Communications service providers (CSPs) are increasingly engaging with the challenges of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services over their networks. The traffic profile is different to traditional telephony and internet services but some requirements remain the same.
Among these is the need to assure mission critical IoT services are reported. Here, John English, a senior solutions marketing manager, and Mike Serrano, a senior product marketing manager at NETSCOUT, discuss the challenges facing CSPs in supporting the highly specific needs of IoT services, apps and networks.
VanillaPlus: What should CSPs be doing now to ensure that their networks can handle the mission critical aspects of IoT devices such as medical devices, industrial applications and automobiles without failures?
Mike Serrano: CSPs will need to develop a classification system for IoT traffic or support some form of application aware routing (AAR). The purpose of this classification of service or class of service (CoS) or AAR will be to ensure that critical traffic is prioritised over noncritical traffic. For example, if grandma’s pacemaker stops, you want to ensure that this notification is prioritised above say a home thermostat reporting that it’s on. When you get into smart cars and especially driverless cars it depends on the nature of the information and where it is being processed. If it’s updating my car’s maps for the western United States as I drive to work, that’s not necessarily a critical update. If I’m in a self-driving car and the on-board systems need real-time communications to an internet-based service for getting me from point A to point B, then service prioritisation and monitoring become very important – especially, if this is happening as we are whizzing down the road at 60mph.
To accomplish this without violating net neutrality rules, which prevent prioritising certain traffic over others, CSPs and regulators will need to work together to approve new classes of service. These classes would identify mission-critical services such as medical, public safety and many others. AAR gets to the same end but will require further investment in optimised edge routing and policy based routing equipment that may need regulatory support to help justify the investment.
VP: Does anything need to be done on the IoT edge device side to ensure that it is properly categorised? For example, will the makers of pacemakers need to include a line of code that designates them as priority traffic, while thermostat makers will include a line classifying them as a low-priority object?
John English: Prioritisation would occur much as it does today. The prioritisation and routing tables would either correlate the MAC address of the device to a Class of Service or prioritisation table, then it would be routed appropriately or the network would be application aware and route appropriately. Each company is assigned a range of MAC addresses that tie the device to the manufacturer today. Each manufacturer would need to range bind certain devices to some sort of IoT classification scheme that CSPs could correlate to various classes of service. For example, Honeywell could manufacture thermostats and heart monitors and when they are deployed in the field, the CSP would know the difference based upon some published standard.
Currently, Cisco is advocating some new routing concepts and technology – optimised edge routing (OER) and policy based routing (PBR) – that would support AAR. This is designed to optimise routing based on the nature of the traffic. Ideally, these routing technologies should be designed with IoT in mind and is consistent with using packet header information for expedited routing.
VP: Is there any value to setting aside specific spectrum for critical communications? Do you think this is likely?
MS: In the US, we do this today. The military and public services, such as police and fire services, have unique spectrum. Given the scarcity of spectrum, it is doubtful that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would set aside spectrum for IoT. It appears more likely that some form of a packet header/MAC identifier/application tagging will be utilised that would serve as the identifier for IoT traffic.
VP: Does the increasing connectivity of traditionally dumb devices have an impact on the business model for service providers? How should they be adapting their business now to prepare for this?
JE: Increasing connectivity of smart services to dumb pipes will have an impact on the business model for service providers. It’s in the interest of both the IoT vendor or IoT service provider to partner with the CSP to ensure that they are not riding a dumb pipe. It’s in the IoT provider’s interest to ensure that they have a guarantee of quality or service level agreement (SLA) on the pipes their traffic rides to ensure a quality of user experience for the IoT user. Now, there are some IoT devices that will probably never go down this path – and whether they should or not is a different question. For example, smart light bulbs will probably not need an SLA on the pipe serving them. With a smart light bulb, the consumer is just not paying enough for the device to justify a robust IoT infrastructure. That said, a manufacturer may decide to differentiate themselves with just such an offering. For the CSP, IoT could have significant upside in revenue for their business model but this would require them either to provide hosting or to develop the back-end services in the CSPs’ data centres.
IoT will offer CSPs a significant opportunity to grow their hosted and managed service portfolio and with virtualisation, this could be done very cost effectively. They should probably look to build something like a Salesforce.com type cloud offering. That is, they would serve a fairly general IoT use case and let an ecosystem build up around the offering to provide unique enhancements for each vertical or for special use-cases.
VP: Independent of IoT device manufacturers and service providers, what should CSPs be doing today to prepare for this influx of smart devices? What can they do to move past being a dumb pipe today that will better prepare them for the smarter world tomorrow?
MS: To prepare today for the influx of smart devices is one of the smartest things a CSP can do as it prepares to embrace virtualisation and software-defined networking (SDN). The ability to understand, develop and deploy these two technologies will be absolutely critical for a CSP to have the flexibility and agility to scale their network fast enough to keep up with the IoT. With virtualisation and SDN in place, CSPs will be able to pursue subscriber self-provisioning, the next logical application of NFV/SDN.
