Page 26 - Unleashing the potenti al of the Internet of Things

1 Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things

7.2 High-level requirements

The following provide high-level requirements which are relevant for the IoT:
– Identification-based connectivity: The IoT needs to support that the connectivity between a
thing and the IoT is established based on the thing's identifier. Also, this includes that
possibly heterogeneous identifiers of the different things are processed in a unified way.
– Interoperability: Interoperability needs to be ensured among heterogeneous and distributed
systems for provision and consumption of a variety of information and services.
– Autonomic networking: Autonomic networking (including self-management,
self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting techniques and/or
mechanisms) needs to be supported in the networking control functions of the IoT, in order
to adapt to different application domains, different communication environments and large
numbers and types of devices.

– Autonomic services provisioning: The services need to be able to be provided by capturing,
communicating and processing automatically the data of things based on the rules
configured by operators or customized by subscribers. Autonomic services may depend on
the techniques of automatic data fusion and data mining.
– Location-based capabilities: Location-based capabilities need to be supported in the IoT.
Something-related communications and services will depend on the location information of
things and/or users. It is needed to sense and track the location information automatically.
Location-based communications and services may be constrained by laws and regulations,
and should comply with security requirements.

– Security: In the IoT, every 'thing' is connected which results in significant security threats,
such as threats towards confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of both data and services.
A critical example of security requirements is the need to integrate different security
policies and techniques related to the variety of devices and user networks in the IoT.
– Privacy protection: Privacy protection needs to be supported in the IoT. Many things have
their owners and users. Sensed data of things may contain private information concerning
their owners or users. The IoT needs to support privacy protection during data transmission,
aggregation, storage, mining and processing. Privacy protection should not set a barrier to
data source authentication.

– High quality and highly secure human body related services: High quality and highly secure
human body related services needs to be supported in the IoT. Different countries have
different laws and regulations on these services.

NOTE – Human body related services refer to the services provided by capturing, communicating
and processing the data related to human static features and dynamic behaviour with or without
human intervention.
– Plug and play: Plug and play capability needs to be supported in the IoT in order to enable
on-the-fly generation, composition or the acquiring of semantic-based configurations for
seamless integration and cooperation of interconnected things with applications, and
responsiveness to application requirements.

– Manageability: Manageability needs to be supported in the IoT in order to ensure normal
network operations. IoT applications usually work automatically without the participation
of people, but their whole operation process should be manageable by the relevant parties.

12 Rec. ITU-T Y.4000/Y.2060 (06/2012)