One With Everything

A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog vendor and says: "Make me One with Everything!"

And that, at least at a philosophical level, appears to be one of the goals shared by both Buddhism and IoT (and, lest we forget, hot dogs). But, how can we get there?

The Telephone System Analogy

It is not always appreciated that before the advent of microwave and other forms of wireless communications used in commercial telephony, the single largest physical machine in the world was the international telephone system. One lifted a handset and was instantly physically connected to a humongous global network of telephones. Well, mostly; there were still manually operated exchanges where someone in front of a patch-panel and switchboard had to plug you in, but one is referring primarily to automated exchanges. Everything was circuit switched those days - packets had not yet been invented.

The conception of that image - a huge fish-net of a machine cast across the globe - must have been daunting to imagine before it was put in place. Yet, got put in place it did, over time. Over time, it progressed from operator assisted connections to electromechanical, and then electronic exchanges. Today, circuit switched networks are being replaced by packet switched networks. Of course, wireless telephony or mobile phones added a few billion end-users, who are never physically connected to the system, but, nevertheless, connected from an operational capability standpoint.

The point is, the telephone network got established, it evolved and got better and it grew the number of subscribers or nodes connected to it. IoT today is somewhat like the international telephone system in its infancy. Except that the connectivity infrastructure is mostly done and the computing infrastructure exists after a fashion but can be fairly quickly augmented.

What Else Is Different?

In Part 3: A Framework for Vertical Solutions, we asked what if there was a possibility we may be able to conceive a framework that may not require domain knowledge of vertical applications at all? All that it would need to do is enable those who already have the domain knowledge.

As the telephone system got put in place, different people used it for different purposes: business and commerce, staying in touch with family, reporting news from location and so on. The system itself did not need to have an understanding of the 'vertical' or 'silo' conversation or business that was being transacted over it. Should we, therefore, conclude that since we already have the network and computing infrastructure today, all 'things' connected would stand up and start transacting on the IoT?

That's where things differ from people. Things do not have human-like brains that enable them to learn different languages, understand concepts, make inferences and evaluate alternatives intuitively. And, these 'things', which are supposed to magically make our lives so much better by becoming autonomously functional still need rules that must come from those other things (read humans, at least for now) who have domain knowledge.

But about rules another day.

The Path to Oneness is Understanding

First we need to make sure that our network and computing infrastructures can enable all the elements in them, starting from the 'things', to understand each other and to transact at speeds that, we, the rule-knowing 'things', are not even fractionally capable of.

In order to do that, connected things in an IoT network need to be able to communicate something about themselves: what they want done, what they have understood as being requested of themselves, what their current condition is and what is the status of whatever it was they were requested to execute.

A picture is worth a thousand words; a moving picture, perhaps a million! Below is a public-domain video developed by the IoT-A (Internet of Things - Architecture) project in Europe. IoT-A devised an architectural reference model and an initial set of key building blocks for the interoperability 'things'.

IoT-A is only one of many projects working on a collection of domain independent frameworks. However, we will let their video set the tone for our brief examination of a version of the connected product technology stack in a forthcoming post.

Coming in Part 5: Change Must Come from Within