Project Description

Standardization for the Internet of Things

Over the past decade, processing power, memory, and connectivity have all become cheap enough that everything that can sense or actuate can communicate over the internet. While this leads to great innovations such as self driving cars, smart grids and cities, big data analytics, and so many more things which touch our lives on a daily basis, managing all of these assets and their data can become a nightmare. Considering that there is no prevailing standard and the early IoT development was based on proprietary implementations, this makes it very hard difficult to merge technologies from different vendors together.

After many years of implementation by industry and research, there has been an emerging common architecture which has emerged, broken into 3 main enetities: the Client, the Gateway, and the Transducer Node. Each of these entities provide a layer of functionality and abstraction. We have noticed this trend and found that the IEEE 1451 Family of Standards provides all of the requirement of modern IoT systems and provide methods to allow exapnsions in new technology and implmentation strategies. The overall network architecture can be seen below.

Project Outcomes

Open-Source Resource Development

Since the start of this project, there have been three main goals. First, the development and implmentation of the IEEE 1451 Family of Standards in a proof of concept network. Second, to establish an open-source test bench which utilizes ready-to-use affordable platforms for developers to begin working with this standard. Third, to track current trends in IoT enables systems and test the family of standards against these new requirements. Project members will be asked to work on all aspects of this project.

Current implementations have maainly been focused on the Raspberry Pi as the main development board and Python as the main language. While there have been developments into MicroPython which can run on smaller processors, we would like to expand our implementations on campus to multiple platforms and languages. Our implementations have also been focusing mainly on networks with only 1-2 Transducer Nodes and a single Gateway. If this standard is meant to meet todays needs, we need to implenent a much more massive network. To do this, we aim to provide a free to use, easy to use open-source development kit which any developer can have access to.