Signposts on IoT’s Data Roadmap

Over the past few weeks, three industry developments signal how the IoT industry will evolve over the coming years. All of them are about data. And all address the foundational capabilities required to generate more opportunities and value from data.  

Technology with commercial intent 

The first development came during a meeting of the GSMA’s 6G Task Force (6GTF) to share activities with a wider audience, beyond the GSMA’s membership community. The 6GTF’s workplan contains seven work streams. Six of these are technical while the seventh is a reporting activity to update the industry on developments within 3GPP. 

In response to commercial realities, all technical workstreams include a component that addresses monetization opportunities. AI, IoT, and sensing are recurring themes in the 6gTF’s activity plan. In addition to monetization, one noteworthy development was the need for a 6G data framework. For the time being, there is a pre-standardization discussion that introduces the concept of a data plane, separate from existing control and user planes. 

Infrastructure for accessibility  

Data accessibility is the second important story. This one involves Swisscom’s CTIO who spoke about the operational and energy-saving opportunities from AI and digital twin technologies. He commented that, “Although AI is already having a notable positive impact on operations, the operator has realised that AI cannot scale without a strong data platform that allows engineers to query the current network state in seconds directly from a real-time data stream.” 

Although telcos possess an abundance of network data, turning that data into knowledge remains a challenge. Swisscom is therefore building a data model that ingests source data and adds context to make it useable across the organisation by anyone using natural language prompts. It bears repeating that network data originates in connected assets and is another form of IoT data. 

Add meaning to data 

The third development involves the EU funded HEDGE-IoT project which aims to digitize the energy grid. One of the project’s pilots involves a business park in the Netherlands where IoT data allows interdependent stakeholders to become more flexible and coordinated in their energy use. As an added benefit, information sharing and anomaly detection also improve grid resilience. Two aspects of the project stand out. One involves data annotation; instead of handling a data measurement with a value of 27, for example, richer communications are possible from annotated data that says the system received a measurement of 27 degrees Celsius, for a given part of a building ‘X’, in location ‘Y’ on the business park. 

The second aspect is about data sharing across organizational boundaries to improve decision-making. Trust is important in these situations because businesses will want to control how much they share while minimizing data storage on a competitor’s infrastructure. HEDGE-IoT applies a decentralized architecture with API connectors operated by each stakeholder. These connectors interpret user requests to find and retrieve data that has been annotated with meaning, like using an old-fashioned phone directory. Equipment vendors are alive to these developments and ready to include APIs and semantic descriptors as part of their product offerings. 

Data Setting the Direction 

The lead up to the 6G era is strongly associated with native-AI and digital twins, both of which depend on quality data. Relative to the challenge of connecting sensors and devices, expect to see greater emphasis on making IoT data easy to share and meaningful to use, especially as vendors incorporate data capabilities into their connected devices.