Protocol Working Group Charter and Organization

Background:

When IPSO developed reusable object definitions the design was heavily based on the object model and RESTful interaction model developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Lightweight Machine-to-Machine (LWM2M) protocol. The LWM2M protocol furthermore focused on the use of Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) as a way to tackle the bandwidth limitations and other resources many IoT devices and their connectivity mechanisms are constrained. HTTP, as an alternative, was seen as inadequate by many since it used a verbose encoding of headers, did not support multicast and relied on TCP as the transport protocol.

During the last few years standards developing organizations and the IETF in particular, have continued their work and developed a new version of HTTP, HTTP/2, and even newer protocols are being proposed, such as QUIC. Some vendors are also interested in supporting non-IP-based protocols or legacy IoT protocols, such as MQTT. Furthermore, new functionality has been added to protocols that allows for server-push communication, such as WebSockets.

This working group takes these new developments around protocols in the work on smart objects into account.

Read the full Charter

Milestones

Drop 1:

Month 1       Decision made about the comparison metrics and the protocols of interest
Month 1       Decision made about the IoT frameworks to be included in the comparison survey
Month 3       Publication of a whitepaper containing the IoT Framework Comparison Survey
Month 4       Publication of whitepaper containing a Protocol Comparison Survey
Month 6       Publication of a whitepaper containing Protocol Usage Guidance

Drop 2:

Month 2       Publication of a whitepaper containing surveyed Gateway Meta Models
Month 7       Publication of a whitepaper containing the Gateway Meta Model
Month 7       Publication of a whitepaper containing the protocol translation model

 Governance

  • Two chairs lead the working group; Tim Spets of Greenwave System currently serves in this role.
  • Bi-weekly conference calls every Thursday at 7 am US PT, Details are on the Wiki.
  • Regular updates to the Board of Directors and discussions about resourcing and potentially funding of implementation efforts. Technical Guidelines to be approved by TAB and BoD before publication.

Additional information is available to members on the Wiki.