Iot Now Magazine - December 2015

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DECEMBER/JANUARY 2015/16 • VOLUME 5 • ISSUE 5

TALKING HEADS Ronan Quinlan Taoglas: the business of antenna design

IoT SECURITY Perilous, porous, up-close and personal

INDUSTRIAL IoT

SMART UTILITIES

SMART CITIES

TELEMATICS

THE BLACK BOOK

The new interconnected manufacturing environment.

See our exclusive Analyst Report in the February/March issue.

Delivering intelligent utilities to ever-smarter homes.

See our Analyst Report at: www.iot-now.com

New spaces for living, working and playing.

See our Analyst Report at: www.iot-now.com

Vehicles and logistics across new delivery chains.

See our Analyst Report at: www.iot-now.com

Independent analysis of IoT in 5 Key Industries.

See our Analyst Report at: www.iot-now.com

PLUS: IoT SECURITY: Analyst Report Inside! • Kyocera and Kii partner on health wearables • Stream Technologies and Wipro partner over LoRa • Ingenu starts roll out of US network • IoT Security Foundation launched • The IoT and Public safety • Maslow and the needs of Things • www.iot-now.com

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CONTENTS

27 13 TALKING HEADS

16 ANTENNAS AND THE IoT

IN THIS ISSUE 4

EDITOR’S COMMENT How can we protect ourselves in the increasingly boundary-free world of the IoT: a little carefully applied paranoia may not be out of place.

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MARKET NEWS Bluetooth gains speed, coverage and mesh capabilities; Berg Insight predicts LEDs to drive IoT growth: Beecham Research warns on market hype: Georgia Tech IoT Centre adds more members

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COMPANY NEWS Wipro and Stream partner for global connectivity; Ingenu rolls Machine Network out in USA; Tata brings LoRa to India; PTC gets into Augmented Reality; Kii partners with Kyocera for healthy wearables

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CONTRACT NEWS & HOT LIST Latest wins for Arkessa, Telensa, Telit and many more

10 PEOPLE NEWS New names at Telenor Connexion, Numerex and others 11

PRODUCT NEWS NFC necklace wins UNICEF award; 1M2M’s multi-sensor LoRa and SIGFOX device; Silver Spring’s new router for Smart Cities

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WHAT’S HOT ONLINE IoT predictions exaggerated? Google leads autonomous driving;

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TALKING HEADS Taoglas’s joint CEO and founder, Ronan Quinlan, on the business of antenna design EXPERT OPINION Guy Daniels on how different antennas work with different IoT application cases

20 INTERVIEW Charles Kreite of Wyless on Parallel Networking for enhanced security 22 NEW INITIATIVES John Moor and John Haine explain the role of the recently formed IoT Security Foundation 24 EXPERT OPINION IoT now explores IoT-related security research at UK universities 27 IoT NOW ANALYST REPORT – IoT SECURITY: PERILOUS, POROUS, UP-CLOSE AND PERSONAL In this edition’s independent Analyst Report, Laura DiDio, director enterprise IoT and analytics at Strategy Analytics explores our growing vulnerability in healthcare and automotive 45 INTERVIEW Mihai Voicu, CSO of the Telit Group, on IoT security principles 49 EXPERT OPINION Euros Evans, CTO of Airwave on the IoT and the emergency services 50 EXPERT OPINION Jim Hunter, chief scientist at Greenwave Systems on ‘Things’ and Maslow’s hierarchy 51

IoT ON THE EDGE A case study from the Australian outback from ORBCOMM

53 IoT MASTERCLASS Beecham Research’s Saverio Romeo on IoT policy issues 56 EXPERT OPINION Security in remote healthcare – a perspective from the PCHA 58 ANALYST REPORT Beecham Research look at AT&T’s healthcare offerings

Cover Sponsor: Headquartered in Ireland and with over 11 years’ experience, Taoglas provides advanced antenna products and RF service solutions to the world’s leading IoT brands. Shipping millions of antennas yearly, with over 100 employees spread across our operations in Ireland, Germany, Taiwan and the USA, our design and support centres are located close to you, wherever you are. These centres have the most up to date test and design equipment. Our multicultural, multi-skilled, vibrant, hardworking team of RF professionals deliver the right solutions to solve your antenna and RF challenges. www.taoglas.com IoT Now - November / December 2015

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COMMENT EDITORIAL ADVISORS

You don’t have to be paranoid to work in the IoT – but it might just help….

Olivier Beaujard, vice-president Market Development, Sierra Wireless

This is the time of year when, at least in the Northern hemisphere, the nights close in, curtains are drawn, fires stoked and, traditionally, ghost stories get told. Without wanting to make our readers’ flesh creep any more than is absolutely necessary, we have chosen to focus on security this issue as one of the potentially darker sides of the IoT’s visionary promise. To lighten those hovering clouds, we’ve included a profile of the newly formed IoT Security Foundation, a round-up of some of the IoT security research currently underway at UK universities, as well as insights from Strategy Analytics and others such as the PCHA on the security challenges ahead and the ways in which we can protect ourselves and our customers.

And, just so the ‘things’ themselves don’t feel left out, we’ve taken a slightly sideways look at their own needs and how they might have a Maslow hierarchy of their own in a thought-provoking piece from Alun Lewis, Greenwave Systems. editor, IoT Now Magazine

We’ve also given a nod to the inevitable shifting of seasons in another way, finally changing our name to IoT Now - as M2M was starting to sound a little too early 21st century to both our ears and those of our readers. Additionally, we’ve launched our new industry portal – www.iotglobalnetwork.com – and that’s already drawing thousands of readers, all keen to learn more about companies,

Erik Brenneis, head of Vodafone M2M

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

products, services and devices as well as best practice insight across what’s an increasingly diverse and multifaceted terrain.

Finally, you’ll notice that we’ve added a separate supplement to this issue – this time on Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks.

Whatever the technology or acronym – LTEM, LoRa, SIGFOX, RPMA, GSM-EC, NB-IoT – LPWA looks like being one of the most positive and disruptive forces to impact the IoT sector for years. Hitting the sector’s sweet spot in a number of different ways, LPWA networks are already being rolled out around the world and, in turn, are also driving considerable activity in supporting parts of the ecosystem such as sensors and devices.

This is a topic we’re already looking forward to returning to in depth in 2016.

Robin DukeWoolley, CEO, Beecham Research

Andrew Parker, project marketing director, Connected Living, GSMA

Gert Pauwels, M2M marketing director, Orange Business

Contributors in this issue of IoT Now We are always proud to bring you the best writers and commentators in M2M and IoT. In this issue they include: Laura DiDio Director enterprise IoT and analytics at Strategy Analytics, examines security in connected cars and healthcare

EDITOR Alun Lewis Tel: +44 (0) 1296 660423 a.lewis@wkm-global.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 j.cowan@wkm-global.com DIGITAL SERVICES DIRECTOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 n.bisnar@wkm-global.com

Guy Daniels Guy’s been a well-known member of the industry for years in various editorial and consulting roles, from the GSMA to Telecom TV

Peter Dykes Peter has been in telecoms for over 25 years, both as a freelance and for major publishing and research companies.

Current interests are in IoT and smart cities

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 c.jameson@wkm-global.com

PUBLISHED BY WeKnow Media Ltd. Suite 138, 70 Churchill Square, Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807411

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Aileen Smith, head of Ecosystem Development, Huawei Technologies

David Taylor, managing director, M2M, Telefónica UK

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Robert Brunbäck, CMO, Telenor Connexion

© WeKnow Media Ltd 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

Bill Zujewski, SVP, IoT Marketing & Strategy, PTC

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

MARKET NEWS

Beecham Research urges industry to ’get real’ about IoT predictions

Robin DukeWoolley, Beecham Research

Beecham Research warns companies not to believe all the overoptimistic predictions in the sector. “To suggest that growth rates exceeding 50% per annum are credible when the long term growth in this market has been consistently in the

20-30% range per annum prompts the question – why - and what is likely to accelerate the overall growth rate so spectacularly? Even if those numbers could be shipped, there are not the resources there to install and implement them. With unrealistic predictions, there is the risk that companies will run out of time and money before they see a return on their investment,” said Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO at Beecham

NB-IOT Forum prepares to take off – new labs to open Telecom industry members China Mobile, China Unicom, Ericsson, Etisalat, the GSMA, GTI, Huawei, Intel, LG Uplus, Nokia, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone have held a preparatory event to found a new industry forum aimed at accelerating the ecosystem around Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technology.

Using licensed operator spectrum, in-band, guard band and stand-alone deployments, the new technology is

designed to provide deep coverage of hard to reach places, supporting a massive number of low throughput, ultra-low cost devices, with low device power consumption and optimized network architecture. China Mobile, Etisalat, LG Uplus, Shanghai Unicom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone also announced their support for the creation of six new NB-IoT labs worldwide, to focus on innovation, interoperability tests and product compliance certification.

Berg Insight says connected LEDs will shape the consumer IOT market A new report from M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight ranks connected LEDs as the most promising vertical market segment in IoT. The global shift from traditional light bulbs to energy saving LED technology is creating a massive window of opportunity for adding connectivity to the next generation of lighting systems. Between 2014 and 2023, the global share of lamps sold based on LED technology is expected to rise from 15% to 74%.

“There are currently some 40 billion lamp sockets worldwide and, by the

next decade, three out of four new lamps installed will be LEDs. Once you add connectivity to this equation, you will have the number one volume Tobias Ryberg, application for IoT”, says Berg Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst at Berg.

“Bluetooth has a very strong chance to win the segment. If, on the other hand, all lights are integrated into a smart home network, 802.15.4 technologies such as ZigBee and Thread will also have a very bright future.”

Bluetooth to gain longer range, faster speed, and mesh capabilities The Bluetooth SIG is focusing on increasing its IoT functionality, with key updates including longer range, higher speeds and mesh networking to support Toby Nixon, smart home, industrial Bluetooth automation, locationbased services and smart infrastructure applications.

“There’s significant demand from our members and the industry at large to enhance Bluetooth with new capabilities,” said Toby Nixon, chairman

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

of the Bluetooth SIG Board of Directors.

“Current projections put the market potential for IoT between US$2 and US$11.1 trillion by 2025. The technical updates planned in 2016 will help make these expectations a reality and accelerate growth.”

Bluetooth Smart’s range is set to increase by up to four times and a 100% increase in speed, without increasing energy consumption, and will enable faster data transfers in critical applications. Mesh networking will open up home and industrial automation applications.

Research. Beecham Research does however point to new LPWA network technologies to provide a growth spurt to the IoT market. “We expect this to deliver up to five million connections by the end of 2015 and increasing quickly thereafter,” said David Parker, a senior analyst at Beecham Research who recently authored a report on this subject.

NEWS IN BRIEF Apple ranks as No. 1 recognised IoT Brand Google falls behind Research commissioned by M2M solutions provider ThroughTek found nearly half of Americans are most familiar with Apple’s IoT devices versus 13% who are most familiar with Google’s connected devices.

Apple’s presence is also high where purchases are concerned, coming out on top among consumers (29%), followed by Samsung (19%), Google (14%) and Amazon (10%).

The report also found that price was more important than security, with almost 31% of Americans seeing cost as their top consideration when purchasing a device, followed by ease of use (21%) and security (15%).

Home security however leads the pack in purchasing motivators with one in three consumers most likely to spend money on this type of IoT device.

Adoption of GSMA’s embedded SIM specification expands Indosat, Tele2 and Telefónica Vivo are the latest operators to launch commercial solutions based on the GSMA’s Embedded SIM Specification for remote over-the-air provisioning of M2M devices such as smart meters or connected cars. The Specification is now backed by 23 mobile operators, including members of the Global M2M Association (GMA) and the M2M World Alliance, and 11 operators worldwide have launched commercial solutions. The adoption of a single specification will reduce fragmentation and help the industry to take advantage of the fastgrowing IoT market, estimated to be worth US$1.1 trillion by 2020.

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COMPANY NEWS PTC to acquire Augmented Reality leader Vuforia from Qualcomm PTC is acquiring the Vuforia business from Qualcomm Connected Experiences, Inc., for $65 million. Vuforia is a mobile vision platform that enables applications to see and connect the Jim physical world with digital Heppelmann, experiences and is PTC supported by developers in 130 countries, powering more than 20,000 apps with more than 200 million app installs worldwide.

When coupled with PTC’s IoT and analytics platforms, it’s planned that Vuforia will create new ways to design products, to monitor and control products, and to instruct operators and technicians in the appropriate methods of use and service. “Because of what the IoT is enabling, more and more products are now a mixture of digital and physical content. So, naturally, the ways in which we interact with these products will evolve toward a mixed-reality model that blends physical and digital interactions“, said PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann.

eeGeo launches global 3D meta-mapping platform for interiors and places 3D mapping company eeGeo has launched a geospatial meta-mapping platform which allows organisations to build interactive mobile applications to deliver Ian location-based services for Hetherington, both interiors and eeGeo exteriors.

“The world is a three dimensional space and our platform accurately represents this as a global 3D map, transitioning seamlessly from outdoors with detail of all terrain, roads and landmarks, to the interior of buildings, right down to office, desk or counter level,” said Ian Hetherington, CEO, eeGeo. “We can visualise any space in intricate detail, including airports, shopping malls, museums, offices, stadiums and whole campuses. This is a platform of true scale; to date we have built the entire USA, Britain, Canada and Japan, plus a host of iconic cities around the world.

Our most powerful differentiator is our ability to engage and retain users, a legacy of our video game roots.”

Wipro and Stream to partner for global solutions – with LoRa Stream Technologies has announced a partnership with Wipro to jointly provide M2M/IoT connectivity solutions to network operators that will help them reduce cost and open up new revenue streams.

The agreement will enable network operators to manage all types of connectivity, cellular, satellite, and Low Power Radio, using one single carrier grade management platform. As part of the partnership, the companies will establish in-country points of presence.

Stephen Snyder, head of Business Innovation , Global Media & Telecom at Wipro, said, “Wipro's partnership with Stream is driven by the growing demand and interest, across the globe, for M2M and IoT connectivity solutions, including LoRa. Our relationship will enable both companies to provide customers with a complete connectivity management solution with the best technology available at the lowest TCO.”

Ingenu announces initial roll-out of Machine Network in USA Ingenu has launched its Machine Network™, planned to cover 30 major metropolitan areas across the United States by the end of 2016. The initial rollout of the Machine Network will launch in Phoenix, Arizona and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Ingenu’s John Horn, Machine Network will be Ingenu powered by the company’s RPMA® (Random Phase Multiple Access) communications

technology, currently operating on over 38 private networks across the globe.

“As we introduce the Machine Network to major markets across the country, we are delivering on the rollout plan that we announced earlier this year,” said John Horn, Ingenu’s CEO. “Ingenu’s RPMA network is ready for virtually any IoT/M2M application and we anticipate that developers and technology partners alike will take advantage of all the benefits that the technology offers such as unprecedented coverage, greater capacity and system longevity.”

LPRS appointed by Link Labs to distribute LoRa-based connectivity products LPRS (Low Power Radio Solutions) has been appointed by Link Labs to sell its market leading LoRa range of wireless modules and gateways. In addition, Link Labs’ proprietary Symphony Link protocol provides ancillary features that include over air upgrades, Quality of Service, multicasting and other features not currently available within LoRaWAN.

“LPRS have almost 30 years’ experience of delivering wireless communication solutions to our customers.” states Nick Pummell, managing director of LPRS. “Link Labs’ commitment to the new long range LoRaTM based hardware and software solutions will allow us to deliver complete end-to-end solutions to our customers for their long range IoT applications.”

Tata Communications debuts ultra-low power connectivity solution for the IoT in India Tata Communications has successfully conducted trials based on LoRa technology for connected IoT applications across Mumbai and Delhi.

Tata plans to roll out India’s first LoRa network across the country, with full coverage starting in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. The first phase targets will cover 400 million people across Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 cities.

Tri Pham, chief strategy officer, Tata Communications, said, “We see a massive need for a new smart network to enable intelligent solutions for a

variety of M2M applications to facilitate a simpler and smarter way of life and at a lower cost of ownership. These trials are just the beginning; we intend to deploy this network across India and invite customers with IoT projects to work with us to test it, end-to-end.”

Tri Pham, Tata

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IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

CONTRACT NEWS Energie Thun starts installation of Landis+Gyr smart meters for electricity - plus third-party gas and water services

Michael Staudinger, Landis+Gyr

Landis+Gyr has won a contract to support the Swiss energy supplier Energie Thun AG with Gridstream®, the company’s end-to-end smart metering solution

including smart meters, communication options, software and services.

“This rollout is an important milestone for the future of the Swiss energy supply system,” says Michael

Staudinger, country manager of Landis+Gyr Switzerland. “Smart meters are an essential ingredient for the development of a smart grid and they provide an important contribution to executing the Swiss government’s Energy Strategy 2050.”

Kii’s IoT platform selected by Kyocera to power wearable smart healthcare device and services Kii has announced a strategic collaboration with Kyocera to develop a cloud-based healthcare monitoring service and smart device combination called 'Daily

Support'. Daily Support features a wearable device that measures step counts, calorie consumption and status detection differentiations, such as between walking, running or going up stairs. It is designed specifically for company employees, health

insurance and healthcare service providers. “Partnering with a world renowned brand like Kyocera to launch a smart healthcare device and service that helps users to lead a healthier lifestyle is a double win for Kii,” said Masanari Arai, CEO of Kii.

Masanari Arai, Kii.

THE CONTRACT HOT LIST IoT Now December/January 2016 It's free to be included in The Contract Hot List, which shows the companies announcing recent contract wins, acquisitions or deployments. Email your contract details to us now, marked "Hot List" at <j.cowan@wkm-global.com> Vendor/Partners Aeris Altair Semiconductor Arkessa ARM ARM Azul CEVA, Inc Cumulocity Ericsson Ericsson Gemalto Gemalto Geotab Geotab Globalstar Globalstar GreenPeak HCC Embedded Jasper Kapsch TrafficCom Kii Landis+Gyr Lantronix Link Labs Link Labs Link Labs Masternaut Masternaut Microlise NXP Semiconductors PTC PTC PTC Sierra Wireless Sierra Wireless SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX Silver Spring Networks Solair Stream Technologies Telensa Telensa Telit Telit Telit WirelessCar

Client, Country Avnet, UA Novatel Wireless Child Angel, UK HeartToHeart Networks LLC u-blox Microsoft VATICS, Inc Wipro G&D, Germany U-Ming Marine Transport, Taiwan Samsung Intrado, USA Telefonica, Germany STS, USA SABIC MOOnitor Sensara Meteonic, India IBM SCADA, Chile Kyocera Energie Thun, Switzerland Avnet, USA LPRS Future Electronics Arrow Electronics Holmes Mann, UK Andrew Page, UK ATL Haulage, UK Siemens, Germany Vuforia, USA ServicePower GE, USA Iskraemeco Itron, Europe Glen Canyon Corp, USA SOGEDO, France City of San Francisco, USA El Towers, Italy VT Networks, Ireland Halifax, Canada Zadi Group, Italy Wipro Doncaster, UK Minsk, Belarus Swisscom, Switzerland Cresatech, UK Netherlands Daimler

Key: AIS = Automatic Identification System

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EV = Electric Vehicle M2M = Machine-to-Machine

Product / Service (Duration & Value) IoT services 4G chip supply Child tracking Health monitoring IoT device platform Java IoT technology Smart cameras IoT partnership M2M subscription management Maritime telematics Smartwatch security support 911 services IoT support Telematics Acquisition Rail telematics Catlle tracking Smart Home development Embedded software partnership IoT platform integration Tolling and intelligent transport infrastructure Health wearables IoT platform Smart meter deployment IoT modules and services LoRa module distributorship LoRa module distributorship LoRa module distributorship Fleet telematics Fleet telematics Telematics solution Intelligent vehicles Acquisition ThingWorx partnership Industrial IoT partnership Smart metering modules Smart gas monitoring modules Smart meter infrastructure Smart water infrastructure Smart city infrastructure Smart city infrastructure IoT infrastructure Smart street lighting IoT platform IoT partnership Smart street lighting Smart parking IoT platform IoT asset protection platform Smart meter modules Connected car platform PaaS = Platform as a Service RFID = Radio Frequency Identification

Awarded 11.2015 10.2015 11.2015 11.2105 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 11.2015 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 10.2015 10.2015 10.2015 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 11.2015 10.2015 9.2015 10.2015 11.2015 10.2015 11.2015 10.2015 10.2015 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 10.2015 10.2015 10.2015 9.2015 11.2015 11.2015 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 10.2015 11.2015 10.2015 10.2015 11.2015 11.2015 10.2015 11.2015 9.2015 10.2015 11.2015 SIM = Subscriber Identity Module TTM = Time-to-Market

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Unleashing the Power of the Internet of Things Gemalto’s M2M connectivity solutions, services and world leading digital security expertise enable trust in our connected world GEMALTO.COM/M2M

IN AN INCREASINGLY CONNECTED SOCIETY GEMALTO IS THE LEADER IN MAKING DIGITAL INTERACTIONS SECURE AND EASY. LEARN MORE AT GEMALTO.COM

PEOPLE NEWS Numerex announces chief marketing and chief revenue officers

Shu Gan

Numerex Corp has announced Shu Gan as chief marketing officer and Vin Costello as chief revenue officer in newly created executive management positions. Shu and Vin both served with Numerex CEO Marc Zionts on prior executive teams at Aicent and Allot Communications.

"Shu and Vin are seasoned executives with decades of experience and a track record of success in the telecommunications and technology industries," said Zionts. "With their appointments to these executive level positions, we have strengthened our ability to expand and improve our sales and marketing operations in keeping with our goal of

being the premier IoT solutions provider in a dynamic and expanding market."

Shu Gan will be responsible for product management, strategic market development and marketing for Numerex. Shu most recently served as corporate VP and GM of Strategic Solutions at Syniverse.

Vin Costello will oversee sales strategy, business development and revenue generation for Numerex.

Previously, Vin served as president and VP of sales, Americas, for Allot Communications, a provider of mobile, fixed and enterprise network solutions for service providers, carriers and enterprise.

Vin Costello

Maria Willander appointed head of marketing at Telenor Connexion

Maria Willander

Telenor Connexion has recruited Maria Willander as its new head of Marketing. Willander has worked in leading positions for over 15 years and comes from a similar role at the Swedish start-up company, myFC, a company that markets an acclaimed fuel cell charger, PowerTrekk. Prior to this Willander held positions as marketing director for Northern Europe at D-Link and marketing director for EMEA at FLIR Systems.

Willander will be responsible for strengthening the Telenor Connexion brand globally and for the further development of a broad marketing program that includes activities to support the company’s global sales and will report to Rickard Widerberg, VP of Product Marketing. She replaces Robert Brunbäck, former CMO, as he assumes a new position as VP of Internet of Things (IoT) within the Telenor Group, where he is responsible for enhancing the Group's investment in IoT.

New UK sales director for Netatmo

Sean O’Brien

Netatmo, the connected consumer lifestyle electronics company has appointed Sean O’Brien as sales director to the UK, also covering Ireland and the Nordic territories. Sean brings to Netatmo more than 20 years’ retail experience working with Fortune Global 500 brands. His track record has been earned through senior sales positions at European and British innovation-focused companies such as Targus Europe Ltd, Lexmark UK, Canon UK, Samsung UK and, most recently, Lenovo UK.

In his new UK-based role, Sean will predominantly focus on expanding Netatmo’s presence of smart and connected home products on the British market. “There is a definite momentum and excitement from both retailers and vendors that are backing the fast-moving category of connected products; giving Netatmo more opportunity to expose our brand to new smart home supporters,” O’Brien said. “Netatmo products offer real home innovation from the Welcome Camera for home security to our Smart Thermostat that allows you to control your heating on the move.”

PTC appoints new VP for Northern Europe

Dave Grammer

PTC has announced that Dave Grammer has been appointed as VP of the newly created Northern Europe Region, which will consist of the Nordics and the United Kingdom. The new region has been formed in order to better align focus and drive long-term growth for PTC. Grammer comes to PTC with over 20 years of experience in the enterprise technology sector, including cloud solutions and

will help PTC’s transition to becoming a predominantly subscription-based license company.

Grammer joins PTC from Infor, a global software provider that specialises in enterprise solutions, where he most recently served as sales director and led the Systemi business unit.

Inrix hires former group head of analytics at Vodafone

Chris Handley

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INRIX, Inc., transportation information, analytics and driver services specialist for the connected car and smart cities worldwide, has named Chris Handley as VP of Product Management and Analytics. Handley will lead the development of INRIX’s ‘movement analytics’ capability, which combines mobile network and GPS data sets to provide public sector and enterprise customers with insights into the movement of people and commerce in urban areas worldwide.

“I am delighted to have joined INRIX as the company was one of the first to pioneer the use of mobile network data to provide population movement insights,” said Handley. He brings more than 20 years of data analytics and product development experience to INRIX, most recently as group head of Analytics at Vodafone. Previously, Handley held a variety of product management positions at AT&T Wireless, GoAhead Software and Visio.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

PRODUCT NEWS Digital necklace wins UNICEF’s ‘Wearables for Good’ design challenge Khushi Baby is a data-storing necklace that provides a two-year personal immunisation record for children. It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to send and receive information through a smartphone. Data is synced to the cloud and displayed on a dashboard accessible to health officials.

Khushi Baby smart necklace

A necklace that stores electronic health data to track child immunisation has won the Wearables for Good challenge run

by UNICEF, ARM and frog. The winning design, led by joint IndianUS teams, will receive a prize of US$15,000 and incubation and mentoring from the partners.

The Wearables for Good competition was launched in May 2015 and has become one of the world’s most inclusive technology and design challenges, attracting 2,000 registrants from 65 countries that resulted in 250 design submissions. It focused on moving the perception of wearables from nice-to-have devices to life-saving products that could work in any environment.

1M2M announces multisensor device for LoRa and SIGFOX networks Sensor and intelligent device company 1M2M used the recent LoRa Alliance conference in Rotterdam to launch the latest in its series of modules. The ED1608 Generic LoRaWAN and SIGFOX compatible sensor has integrated GPS, Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz mesh connectivity, a 3D accelerometer, a 3D magnetometer and temperature, humidity, vibration, rotation and tracking sensors. The ED-1608 offers significant improvements in power consumption, size, functionality and price on its predecessor, the ED1600.

1M2M ED1608 LPWA sensor device

Silver Spring unveils new IoT Edge Router for smarter cities

Brandon Davito, Silver Spring Networks

Silver Spring Networks new IoT Edge Router is designed to allow network operators to ‘plug and play’ new and legacy smart city devices into these already deployed networks, such as smart street light and smart grid systems.

Brandon Davito, VP of Smart Cities at Silver Spring Networks, said, “Historically, the costs and complexity of deploying and operating single-purpose networks has prevented many cities from realising the potential of the IoT. Now, they can easily

add new types of smart city devices to their existing network, without sacrificing the performance and security they need and without succumbing to the exorbitant costs and lock-in of cellular or other proprietary solutions.”

Paul Wilson, MD of the Bristol is Open smart city project in the UK added, “Silver Spring has helped us by supplying its IPv6 wireless canopy to connect devices such as street lights, traffic control systems, and other sensors. We will integrate the new IoT Edge Router into the environment to allow us to easily deploy more devices and applications as we establish an advanced IoT environment.”

OPINION

SPONSORED COLUMN

IoT provider to the Enterprise: Keep my business card, you will use it!

In a recent conversation with a top-tier analyst firm about the lethargy in adoption of the IoT by the enterprise sector, I found some confirmation to a long standing suspicion. There is reasonable consensus across the industry analyst community that a significant number of Fortune 1000 players are working to home-grow their IoT solutions.

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

That is not surprising. With so much noise in the tech industry surrounding the IoT- particularly in the software/platform space where barriers to entry are low and the rate of new companies appearing daily in the digital marketplace claiming to be the next THING is enough to make anyone want to run for the hills - it stands to reason that the very risk averse enterprise would chose to at least investigate and experiment internally. If for no other reason, to know what questions to ask from future, potential solution providers.

But the analysts also agree that this is only a

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

phase. The IoT is so complex and packs so much economic impact potential that two very important things will likely happen near term.

First, the deluge of entrants will abate and any true business value among entrants will be consolidated. Second, traditional enablers and providers in the IoT will surface with offerings and business models that align well with the enterprise and its channel. Telit recently posted an enlightening white paper by analyst firm ABI on the latter, modeling out the IoT Engine concept for the enterprise that I invite you to download from www.telit.com/whitepaper/ABIResearch

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WHAT’S HOT ONLINE

www.iot-now.com How many things? Nobody knows IoT predictions for 2020 are unrealistic and there are wide variations: Morgan Stanley has 75 billion, Cisco pegs it at 50 billion, as did Ericsson, but in June they brought it down to 26 billion. Proof that these figures are nothing more than guesstimates. They’ve driven IoT to the peak of inflated expectations in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, so now it would seem that it is going to descend and enter the trough of disillusionment, says the independent M2M writer and analyst, Bob Emmerson.

I’m not an analyst, but I assume that these figures come from unrealistic assumptions, for example, that if the average home has half-a-dozen devices that could be connected then they will be connected. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean that it will be done. There has to be a business case: in fact there have to be zillions if the IoT is going to produce “trillions of dollars in new revenue by 2025.”

specialised in the M2M and IoT markets for 15 years and they are warning companies planning to get into the Internet of Things not to believe all the hype and over-optimistic predictions. CEO Robin Duke-Woolley points out that these forecasts are not only unrealistic, but that they are potentially damaging to the industry if companies are building their business plans and funding expectations on these figures.

The italicised text comes from Beecham Research, an analyst and consulting firm that has

www.iot-now.com (Search for: Hype)

Bob Emmerson

First live LTE aggregation of licensed and unlicensed bands tested by Voda, Ericsson and Qualcomm Ericsson, Vodafone and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have jointly conducted what is said to be the world’s first live testing of advanced LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) in licensed and unlicensed bands on a commercial mobile network.

The trial uses the Ericsson RBS 6402 indoor small cell, which supports LTE CA between licensed and unlicensed bands on Vodafone’s commercial network, connected to a LTE unlicensed band capable test device developed by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Matthias Sauder, chief network officer, Vodafone Netherlands, said: “Our intent in deploying small cells is always to deliver the best customer experience, and we see the potential for LTE aggregation with unlicensed bands on small cells as one way to make that customer experience even better. We are already using Ericsson’s RBS 6402 indoor picocell in our own shops in the Netherlands, so it’s great to see that it will also support advanced LTE CA capabilities with unlicensed spectrum on our network.”

www.iot-now.com (Search for: licensed)

Google leads autonomous driving tech, testing and software development, says IHS Southfield, Mich., USA. November 12, 2015 – Autonomous driving continues to be one of the most widespread R&D activities within the global automotive industry. Car makers and tech companies are striving to deploy advances for on-road testing and approvals.

According to a new report from IHS Automotive, part of IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), companies like Google are currently looking for solutions in the autonomous vehicle space. Meanwhile, “car- as-aservice” organisations like Uber, Lyft and others are set to create disruption and add operational expertise

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that will significantly influence autonomous vehicle development and consumer consideration in the next decade. (Also see: Who’s driving the autonomous car – automotive or tech?)

Self-driving and driverless cars are inevitable, says IHS. It is only a question of time in bringing various options to market for consumers, and gaining their acceptance. The report includes full IHS Automotive analysis of Google’s past activities — and outlines future scenarios for Google and others in the auto industry as they continue technology developments toward autonomous driving.

www.iot-now.com (Search for: Autonomous)

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

TALKING HEADS

Diversity and sensitivity – the business of antenna design

A perspective from Taoglas If there’s one often overused – and sometimes abused - word that sums up the last few decades of human history then it’s diversity. Advances in transport and communications technologies have brought widely different people, places, ideas and cultures into close proximity with one another. Moves from mass manufacturing to just-in-time techniques have also driven an explosion in consumer choice.

Meanwhile, the concept of managing diversity successfully remains central to the longer term IoT project. Many business models involve gathering different types of data from different sensors and devices – and then analysing it and expressing it in different ways to different parties. Whether it’s a single IoT based supply chain or an entire Smart City, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

But diversity also raises its sometimes problematic head in the realm of those wireless technologies that will underpin the IoT’s success. The world’s radio engineers have developed a wide spectrum of radio technologies – each with its own strengths, weaknesses and IoT application sweet spots. With so many other segments of the IoT world attracting attention, it’s all too easy for the critical role that antennas play in the entire value chain to be forgotten.

IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently sat down with Ronan Quinlan, one of the founders of antenna specialist Taoglas and its joint CEO along with cofounder Dermot O’Shea - to discuss the role that his company and its products and services are now playing and the specific challenges this sector now faces in making wireless connectivity ubiquitous, reliable – and more diverse and more sensitve than ever before to cope with fast changing technologies and use cases.

IoT Now: Ronan, for probably the majority of players in the IoT world, the subject of radio antennas remains an arcane and esoteric world involving some kind of alchemy that makes base materials sensitive to radio waves. Ask your average layman what an antenna is and they’ll probably still visualise a length of wire sticking out of something. What’s really going on – and what will this mean for the future of the IoT?

Now, when we look at antenna issues specifically in the M2M/IoT space, there are both similarities - and significant

Ronan Quinlan, co-founder and joint CEO, Taoglas

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RQ: The high tech industry has short memories and it’s all too easy for us to forget how far antenna technologies have come in only a short space of time. It wasn’t that long ago that you’d need to hire another mobile phone when you went abroad to handle the differences between GSM and CDMA. Look at what comes as standard in most handsets: you’ve got multi-band, multi-mode cellular capabilities plus GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and, increasingly, NFC – all with no apparent impact on original form factors. That’s a major feat of engineering by often unsung teams of engineers, working across multiple specialist fields, to design, build and integrate those functionalities cost-effectively, often under intense time to market pressures.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH CYAN IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

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TALKING HEADS

Our physical presence in the USA began around four years ago when Dermot relocated to San Diego to progress the operations there

For example, the typical ‘shark fin’ antenna that most readers will have sitting on top of their cars conceals levels of antenna design and integration – and some aerodynamic styling - that would have been impossible to achieve only a few years ago. Look at the variety of radio systems now in cars that we take for granted. For a start there are the infotainment systems that use AM/FM, DAB, SDARS and in-car Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and TV. On top of that, you also often have a full range of 2G, 3G and 4G cellular services to support.

There’s obviously GPS for positioning and navigation, radio for Remote Keyless Entry or Tyre Pressure Monitoring applications, plus a growing range of automated Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) functions – not forgetting collision avoidance radar. Finally, there’s also the issue of having backup antennas as required by eCall type laws for situations when a car might end up on its roof through an accident.

Indeed, the potential of the whole Connected Car concept - and the part that Taoglas’s design, production and service skills can play - led us to open a dedicated design and support facility in Munich in October this year largely to support this market via German automotive OEMs. IoT Now: That recent Munich opening seems to highlight the very international flavour of Taoglas that you emphasise a lot in your marketing material, with R&D, manufacturing and test resources distributed across Ireland, Taiwan and San Diego in the US. What’s the story behind that?

RQ: A lot of it, as ever, comes down to serendipity – backed up, I’d hasten to say, with a lot of serious strategic planning. From humble beginnings, Dermot O’Shea and I have grown Taoglas to be the only IoT antenna company that’s truly operating worldwide, servicing regional customers from our local test labs, whether it be a start-up or the largest car OEM - a one-stop-shop for products and RF services. We are going to keep opening operations and test labs in other countries in 2016 at a rapid pace, so watch this space!

We founded Taoglas in Taiwan which gave us access to some superb radio design engineering skills and manufacturing resources. We concentrated very heavily in our early years on innovation and development in ceramic antennas and soon developed close links with major players such as Gemalto and u-blox. We developed innovative products for the global

M2M embedded automotive market. Today we manufacture the majority of our antennas in Taiwan, and some of the highest end ones in Ireland and San Diego. For customers such as Advantech in Taiwan we supply combination antennas which helps them service the M2M and vehicle market.

Our physical presence in the USA began around four years ago when Dermot relocated to San Diego to progress the operations there– a city where there’s obviously a lot of resident expertise in radio technologies thanks to Qualcomm’s historic presence there. The USA’s global lead in LTE deployments gave us advanced access to insights into the radio engineering issues involved and since then we’ve built a significant success in relationships with carriers like AT&T and Verizon, initially supporting their telematics offerings. Our MIMO solutions are being used by customers such as Sparks Police Dept in Nevada who use our five-in-one Pantheon MA.750 external antenna that supports GPS/GLONASS, 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi with 2x2 LTE MIMO. And, not forgetting our home turf in Ireland, we’ve also continued to invest, through a tripling of our facility space this year, a planned-for opening of a millimeter wave test lab in Wexford, and through a joint R&D programme with the Dublin Institute of Technology on advanced antenna technologies.

IoT Now: Diversity also raises its head in the sheer range of new wireless technologies now emerging from various laboratories to both compete with - and complement - existing standards. What do you see that’s hot at the moment?

RQ: In an IoT context, it’s obviously got to be the newer flavours of LTE being adapted for this market – more specifically LTE-M – as well as EC GSM for those service providers looking to use that spectrum. Then there are also the proprietary and semi-proprietary Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network technologies, though how they’ll play out eventually given the sheer scale of likely planned LTE IoT service deployments is another question and our feeling is that LTE-M is likely to become dominant.

We’re also seeing a lot of potential in the new mega constellation LEO satellite services, especially for broadband internet backup in gateway devices – or to bring connectivity to remote parts of the world. With the huge cost decreases made possible by using these services, this should enable the millimetric realm to finally be used on a commercial mass market scale – a truly global Internet of Things.

IoT Now: Your collateral also emphasises the services and support side of things – presumably you see that as being a key differentiator? ▼

differences. Take the sector where Taoglas essentially started – GPS vehicle tracking – which has now evolved into telematics. What once involved a dedicated device is now a standard part of almost any vehicle’s design - soon to be mandated by law on new cars in many regions for emergency positioning such as eCall in the EU. What’s more, this has to share ‘space’ in a number of ways with other wireless systems.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH TAOGLAS 14

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

RQ: We’ve understood right from the start that there’s much, much more needed if you’re to be successful in the antenna business than just excellent engineering. Performance certification is increasingly critical when mission and life-critical communications are involved as they are in much of the IoT, so we track and test every antenna that we supply, enabling us to rapidly identify any variations from the specified – and contracted – metrics.

That also helps our device manufacturer customers get the necessary regional type approval from organisations like the CTIA PTCRB board and the FCC – we’ve already done much of the heavy lifting involved.

We also realised that the biggest problems facing our customers almost always involve integration issues and the impact that different configurations of antennas, components and their location have on the eventual performance. Not only do we provide a service to our customers to help them integrate radio connectivity efficiently and cost effectively, but we are the first in the industry to have standardised this in a spirit of openness, with clearly defined costed and timed service packages, from initial feasibility studies right through to custom antenna designs and full hardware reviews. This means that projects will be done on time and within budget - and in a matter of weeks rather than months.

With an industry moving as quickly as the IoT sector is – and the sheer diversity of applications that are being found for the technology - it’s crucial that we’re also as sensitive as we can be to our customers’ own strategies and, indeed, of their own customers further down what seems to be an everlengthening value chain.

Ronan Quinlan is co-founder and joint CEO of Taoglas and has over 18 years’ experience in the electronics industry. His expertise in this area covers a broad spectrum, with a key focus on production, quality processes, and antenna and wireless product development.

Ronan oversees all product development within the company and has overall responsibility for Taoglas EMEA region and Taoglas Taiwan operations.

Ronan is a pioneer in the machine-to-machine antenna market and advises companies worldwide on their antenna strategy. He is responsible for co-developing and designing some of the industry’s most innovative antenna technology – launching the world’s first ceramic SMD high efficiency hexa-band cellular antenna, the PA.25 (The Anam). Ronan earned an Honours Bachelor degree of International Commerce from University College Dublin, Ireland and a Diploma in Mandarin Chinese from Taiwan Normal University.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

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EXPERT OPINION

Antennas squeezing the maximum value out of your spectrum So you want to design and deploy networks of wireless IoT devices? Sounds simple in theory; you just connect them to the network. But what network, and how? By their very nature, IoT devices are small, have low power capabilities, and will most likely be sited in the most challenging environments for radio propagation, writes IoT Now contributor, Guy Daniels

First, the network. At the far end we have the cellular networks. Although there could be upwards of 20 billion connected devices by 2020, cellular networks will support only a subset of this – as little as 2 per cent according to some analysts. Of these, 2G (GPRS) devices remain the

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most prominent, although 4G (LTE) should overtake GPRS by 2019, with 3G largely bypassed. But the cellular operators have plans to dramatically increase their share of the market, such as the forthcoming LTE-M standard, which optimises LTE for M2M and IoT use cases.

The alternatives to cellular for remotely located devices are satellites and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking technologies. We then have WiFi, and the various flavours of the 802.11 standard. Whilst the ac variant is becoming more popular in the home, the IEEE recognises that it is not the best for wide area device connectivity, and so they are working on the new “ah” variant.

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Amongst the most important considerations are the network and the antenna. In other words, what type of wireless network will be used for connectivity, and consequently what antenna - or multiple antennas - are needed and will be compatible with the device’s design and physical properties? Do you use an external antenna, or embed one into the module itself?

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Just to complicate matters, the Bluetooth SIG is developing an evolution of the standard that promises support for longer distances, higher speeds and mesh networking, taking it out of the “room-based” environment and even out of the house itself.

The list of connectivity options is huge – and of course, each option comes with its own antenna requirements.

It’s the antenna’s job to pluck the necessary information from the full radio spectrum, and it does this by locating specific wavelengths.

Wireless technologies use a set of internationally agreed frequencies, which are inversely proportional to wavelengths. So, if your device is communicating over WiFi 802.11g (the most common type for WiFi IoT), it will be using the 2.4GHz spectrum band. It therefore needs an antenna to pick up signals with wavelengths of about 12cm to pass on to the radio unit. Usually, the wavelength corresponds to the physical size of the antenna – so in this case a typical half-dipole antenna must be 6cm long. Go shorter than a quarter of the wavelength and signal strength and bandwidth fall fast.

An antenna is perhaps one of the most critical components of the product; if it is designed well, the full performance of the radio device will potentially be realised. However a poorly designed antenna will greatly reduce the maximum range of the radio and additionally reduce the usable data-rates at medium ranges.

The three main factors of IoT antenna design are: size, power and reliability. These three factors are often interconnected: it is crucial that devices in remote locations operate reliably – the cost of physically servicing such devices is prohibitively expensive – and being out in the field generally means low-power consumption (they could be required to be operational for ten years). And, of course, these devices are usually very small. Often, IoT modules are no larger than a coin, which places immense design pressures on manufacturers.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Types of Antenna The most common design for small IoT devices, where physical space is at a premium, is prefabricated chip antennas. They are relatively easy to design and are also cost effective when producing high manufacturing volumes. However, they are not overly efficient and are somewhat restricted in bandwidth adoption. Another factor is that care is needed in the overall design of the module and related circuitry if maximum performance is to be obtained.

It’s the antenna’s job to pluck the necessary information from the full radio spectrum, and it does this by locating specific wavelengths

Chip antennas can be as small as 2mm square to over 20mm in length, and can be manufactured on a ceramic substrate or a small piece of multi-layer PCB (Printed Circuit Board). However, the chip itself is only half of the antenna system - the PCB forms the other half and acts as a ground for the antenna. As such the chip’s maximum performance is only going to be realised if the PCB and layout are precisely as stipulated on the antenna manufacturer’s datasheet – a detail often overlooked in practice.

For manufacturers of more complex IoT devices, especially those that contain multiple sensors and are destined for large-scale manufacturing where the lowest unit costs are required, PCB antennas could be the best option. The PCB manufacturing process has been well-honed in recent years, and there is a sizeable market in designers, simulation software, reference architectures and support.

In fact, there are many free reference designs available. PCB antennas can be planar monopole or have a meandered conductor design, where the antenna is traced in a pattern on the circuit board.

The most popular types of printed antennas include patch antennas, inverted-F antennas (IFA), or planar inverted-F antennas (PIFA).

They take up less space than a dipole antenna because they use the ground plane of the circuit board to help them radiate. Variants include flexible printed circuit (FPC) and stamped metal antennas.

The next step in performance would be to source a proprietary antenna design, either inhouse or outsourced to specialists. This becomes a more viable option if the exact use case of the device is known from the outset, to enable to antenna to be designed for maximum efficiency. ▼

On a more local scale, there is a plethora of short-range wireless standards from which to choose, including Bluetooth, ZigBee and ZWave. These options typically use a central hub or gateway to connect to a router for onward transmission over WiFi, fixed lines or cellular.

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EXPERT OPINION

Many OEMs don’t have the resources to support an RF engineering team, or are able to fulfil the high production volumes needed for custom antenna designs, which is why many of the leading antenna companies are expanding their portfolios to support specialist IoT requirements. By using a “standard” antenna from an established vendor, an IoT OEM can be assured of a pre-tuned, quality product that can be easily integrated onto a PCB assembly, and which are typically multi-band enabled via a single antenna. These relatively lowcost, repeatable designs will feature many standard commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. In addition, these firms can also provide systemsoriented field application engineers to help with faster prototyping and time-to-market.

Where budgets are tightest, wired antennas could be an option. They are extremely low cost and design-wise very flexible, but require decent design skills if they are to be optimised to fit into a module. They do need more testing and simulation regarding electromagnetic performance, and may even lead to a rethink about the physical housing of a device, if added bulk is to be avoided.

Another reason to use wired antennas is if multiple wireless technology transceivers are required for the IoT device. In such a case, several different antennas can be attached to the module board via micro-coaxial cable, enabling the various antennas to be situated apart from one another for better performance.

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However, where budgets are more flexible and confined space is not a problem, then the maximum performance is still to be found in a whip antenna. Yes, the antenna is external, requires a physical connection with the module PCB, and is expensive to buy, but it will give the best performance. Also, if the module housing is constructed of metal, then an external antenna is going to be essential.

And you wonder why IoT antenna design is generally regarded as an exercise in balancing trade-offs?

Another design factor is the choice of singleended or differential antennas. In single-ended signalling, the transmitter generates a single voltage that the receiver compares with a reference voltage. However, significant EM interference can be generated by a single-ended system and as such this design is not always feasible for optimal circuit board construction.

Differential antennas use two complementary signals, and are either a pair of wires twisted together or a pair of traces on a circuit board.

These are usually more suited to low power applications because of their treatment of multipath issues – as waves propagate, they bounce and deflect off objects, interfere with other signals, start to decay quicker and create multipath signal noise. Yet differential systems require more space. ▼

Where budgets are tightest, wired antennas could be an option. They are extremely low cost and design-wise very flexible, but require decent design skills if they are to be optimised to fit into a module

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

For many IoT applications, physical space is limited, hence higher frequency systems are preferred – the higher the frequency of the radio system used, the lower the wavelength and hence a more compact design of module and antenna is possible. Lower the frequency and you need to allocate more space in your device. Yet lower frequency systems can communicate over far greater distance.

We’re back to trade-offs again. We are going to need cm-Wave and mm-Wave frequencies (of 60GHz and above) to enable more efficient and sophisticated antennas in tiny form factors.

A final note of caution on antenna design: there are numerous other factors to consider and be aware of when settling on an antenna design for your IoT module. Space is always limited on a circuit board, and so antennas need to coexist with other electronic components, whose proximity can cause EM and interference issues. PCB antennas also need precise etching in pre-determined patterns; get this wrong and you’ll never have an optimised connection.

Co-existence But, just because you want to have multi-radio connectivity doesn’t always mean you need separate antennas. A single antenna is possible that is tightly integrated into the device, but it’s a highly complex feat of EM engineering that requires extensive signal simulation to ensure that the required frequencies and bandwidths are covered whilst also maintaining the required isolation between bands and achieving the best all-round performance possible. Look no further than your high-end smartphone for such a device, which will have at least five different GSM and LTE antenna ports, plus Bluetooth and possibly two WiFi frequencies (and we no longer have to pull out a plastic whip antenna; it’s all integrated into the handset, invisible to users).

IoT brings similarities, but also differences. Take the connected car sector as an example. In terms of M2M/IoT there’s obviously vehicle tracking (inherited from the telematics

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

sector) and which will soon be mandated by law in certain regions as part of emergency positioning programmes, such as eCall in the EU, but there’s an increasing number of Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) functions coming on to the market now.

However, these connected IoT units need to coexist with a plethora of other radio systems. On a high-end, in fully equipped car, it would not be uncommon to also have: AM/FM, DAB radio, satellite radio, 2G, 3G and 4G cellular, in-car WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, radio for remote keyless entry, a variety of on-board sensors, and even digital terrestrial TV. And so the IoT antennas have to share limited space on the outside of the car which, being essentially a metal box, is a mobile Faraday cage - hence the typical ‘shark fin’ antenna that sit on top of most vehicles.

Where space is at a premium, such as in small sensor modules, there is a need to combine antennas to support different frequencies. Ethertronics, for example, combines an active antenna, RF systems and chip technology into a turnkey plugand-play module, which dynamically senses and optimises the antenna system, without any external control. Operating from 700MHz to 3GHz, it can cover cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi and ZigBee. “With the continued expansion of the M2M and IoT markets, we’re seeing increased demand for advanced plugand-play solutions that need to meet higher expectations for the users and designers,” said Olivier Pajona, chief scientist for Ethertronics. “EtherModule 2.0 is a testament to our continued dedication to customers by developing highly advanced solutions to help them differentiate their products and stand out in a competitive market by providing maximum performance and reliability.”

So is antenna design the domain of the Black Arts? Not exactly, but it is certainly a highly skilled process that requires time, money and expertise, and is a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of the IoT value chain.

Radio Planning Having determined your choice of connectivity, then gone ahead and designed the optimum antenna, there is still another important consideration for maximising IoT radio effectiveness. This time, though, it’s out of the module designer’s hands, as it’s a network issue.

For those looking to deploy their own wide area IoT networks, using LPWA technologies, the first stage is to run extensive simulations.

Siradel is one firm that is focused on this sector, with its S_IoT dedicated LPWA simulation software. Place your devices within a 3D visualisation of the actual environment and then see how signal propagation maps out. Get it right in software and you minimise the requirements for actual field site surveys and reduce deployment costs.

Cellular operators have their own inhouse expertise when it comes to deploying radio networks, but even they need to rethink their approach when faced with millions of new connected devices expected in the coming years.

Germany-based Core Network Dynamics (CND) believes it has a solution to solve what will soon become a traffic crisis for IoT on cellular networks. The company was formed in 2013 to commercialise OpenEPC (Enhanced Packet Core) technology developed by the Fraunhofer FOKUS research institute. Using Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) – a rapidly emerging field of network design for telecoms operators – CND believes its OpenEPC platform can be used to isolate traffic between devices, by using virtualisation techniques to create private networks – effectively, networks within networks. According to the company, a complete mobile network infrastructure in software can now be run on commodity hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi.

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INTERVIEW

Parallel Networking – a strategy to defeat the hackers When it comes to keeping IoT services secure, diversity and flexibility can be just as important here as they are in the Personal Computing world – or indeed, in the world of living things. For a long time it’s been recognised that a single, extensively-used ecosystem – such as Windows - is far more vulnerable to attack than more limited and specialised ones.

Charles Kreite, chief revenue officer, Wyless

IoT Now: After bumping along below most people’s conscious waterline for the last few decades, M2M and particularly IoT concepts are now at the top of many corporate agendas.

How’s this translating into vulnerabilities and increased security-related activity?

CK: Probably one of the most important issues that we see is companies realising that networks and security principles that they’ve used for a while are no longer sufficiently secure. Word gets around the hacker community all too quickly as we know and even if the participants aren’t directly malicious or seeking to extract money or saleable customer or bank account data, they can still bring a network and a business to its knees.

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A good example of that involves companies understanding that open infrastructures – like the public internet or open cellular networks can no longer be trusted. Hackers can use sniffers to identify unsecured devices with public IP addresses and then exploit these in a number of ways.

We’ve seen companies here who are paying their service providers on a per-Kb data traffic plan suddenly be hit by huge bills as a result of a hacker driving a Denial of Service (DoS) attack at the devices, pushing traffic loads up into the many Mb range. We talk about ‘bill shock’ hitting ordinary consumers when they find their teenage children downloading films while abroad and roaming – in the business world, these sorts of things can be career-limiting to say the least.

The solution here is pretty straightforward: use proxy IP addresses and move the traffic to a private APN environment. Other network types are available!

IoT Now: Some of the attacks that have hit the headlines recently – such as hacked cars – have

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When it comes to delivering a secure environment for the IoT, being able to deliver a range of connectivity and configuration options to users and customers can be one important building block – amongst many. To discuss these and other security-related topics, IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, spoke with Charles Kreite, chief revenue officer for IoT company Wyless.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

INTERVIEW

been the result of bad – or, at the best, naive - engineering design. In one case hackers were able to get into the vehicle’s control system via the WiFi-connected infotainment system. What’s your take on this?

CK: Once again, the fundamental principle should be if you can’t connect it securely then look for other options – or don’t even connect it at all. There are very basic and well understood risk management principles, models and tools out there to help quantify the impact of a breach on a company and its brand. This is where the concept of Parallel Networking comes into its own, ensuring that an attack on one part of a business’s infrastructure doesn’t rapidly escalate into a wholesale disaster. ‘Defence in depth’ is a standard military adage – and we’d add physical and virtual separation of networks and compute resources onto that as well via the Parallel Networking idea.

The real world again shows how failure to adhere to these principles can be all too easily exploited. One major retailer in the USA suffered a huge breach of its customers’ credit card details when hackers broke in through the companies HVAC systems – that in turn obviously had a disastrous effect on those consumers’ confidence. While that’s bad enough, the tightening of corporate governance laws around the world are now starting to make individual executives personally responsible for data breaches and that’s starting to concentrate people’s minds wonderfully.

Here, it would have been comparatively straightforward to untangle these different functions and, for example, use LTE to connect the HVAC systems. LTE is becoming an increasingly economically attractive option to use here with low data usage plans translating into a cost of around US$10 per month. Out of Band options can also be appropriate here as well.

There’s some additional good news in terms of Parallel Networking options for users with the recent appearance of Low Power Wide Area technologies on the scene. We’re already engaged, for example, in discussions with SIGFOX and we’re able to enhance their own security principles with end-to-end encryption to provide an extra level of protection.

IoT Now: And what about the all-important issue of executive awareness? In my experience, security experts have all too often been seen by board members as ‘those awkward people who stop me earning my bonus and keep saying no to my bright ideas’.

CK: It’s much, much better than it was even in the recent past – though there’s always room

for improvement when security’s concerned.

If I was to look at the different sectors that we deal with, security is pretty much top of the agenda when it comes to the healthcare and fitness sectors for obviously good reasons. Amongst say product managers in other sectors, it’s certainly in the top three topics.

That said, there’s much to concern us as an industry when it comes to awareness amongst the general public – especially where the youth cohort is concerned. Sadly, in many domestic IoT devices and applications it’s all too likely to be a race to the bottom on price and a similar race to be first to market.

Neither of those factors suggest that security is going to be an overwhelming priority for at least some manufacturers – and certainly many shoppers when they’re browsing the shelves of their local hardware stores.

Education is going to be critically important here to protect ourselves both as individuals and, collectively, as nations.

There’s some additional good news in terms of Parallel Networking options for users with the recent appearance of Low Power Wide Area technologies on the scene

I do however have a strong sympathy for the difficult situations that many executives are now faced by in the IoT race - and it is in between the proverbial rock and hard place.

Security issues these days are so multifaceted and multifactorial that point approaches by themselves are incapable of addressing the sheer variety of vulnerabilities that will inevitably be exposed in such a commercially and technologically dynamic sector. That’s one reason why we often find ourselves being asked to take over project management responsibility for many IoT deployments, supporting, working closely with and helping train in-house staff. Hackers work as communities and we have to apply the same principles ourselves, using a variety of solutions, shared best practice and openness to anticipate and defeat our enemies. After all, nature’s been using these same principles pretty successfully for many millions of years – with our presence here as evidence of a successful strategy.

Charles is responsible for the Wyless sales organisation, sales strategy, and general P&L. Prior to Wyless, he served as executive vice president of TDMobility, a joint venture between Tech Data Corporation and Brightstar Corporation. Charles was appointed as the lead executive over the company after Tech Data and Brightstar jointly acquired OTBT, Inc. where he served as president, CEO and co-founder. While at OTBT, he led the company’s growth from the start-up phase to become the largest mobile distributor to the IT VAR Channel, ultimately leading it through its joint acquisition by Tech Data and Brightstar Corporations. Prior to founding OTBT, he held various management positions with CDW Corporation.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH WYLESS IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

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NEW INITIATIVES

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility…”

The launch of the IoT Security Foundation With security being a central focus for this edition of IoT Now, we thought it would be good to speak to two of the founders of a recently created specialist organisation – the IoT Security Foundation – to hear what’s driven the cross-industry consensus needed to establish it and how it aims to improve best practice both in the UK and abroad.

IoT Now: Councils, associations, forums and assorted other flavours of organisation seem to be constantly springing up around the IoT space these days. Before we go on to explore the aims and structure of the IoT SF, what’s history behind it and what led you to add yet another acronym to an already crowded landscape?

JM: Like many in what is now referred to as the IoT sector, we have been involved in it at NMI for years – but historically we did not call it ‘IoT’ at the time and instead used terms such as pervasive computing, ubiquitous sensing and connectivity. It was probably back in 2008 when

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we were putting together a new UK flagship conference – the Future World Symposium – that we first saw the serious emergence of a trend that would bring together various topics that the NMI was already deeply involved in: embedded systems, connectivity, and ‘electronic enablement’ – things like sensors and actuators, and so on. We saw then that the world was accelerating into the digital domain because of the convergence and lowering of costs of technology.

Over the years, we observed the growing interest in IoT to the point that it not only became mainstream, but increasingly over-hyped. As of the beginning of 2015, there had been so many initiatives formed and events run, that it was difficult to know which to get involved in. We felt strongly that we needed to do something in support of our “deep-tech” membership, but equally didn’t want to add to the noise and confusion. More recently, we started picking up on growing concerns that security issues could dramatically affect the success of this sector those of our members that were involved in it.

We also felt that this aspect was not being ▼

IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently caught up with two of the people behind the initiative: John Moor, VP new segment development at NMI, the not-for-profit UK organisation created in 1996 to improve the quality of electronic engineering and manufacturing across the UK; and John Haine, a very well-known figure in electronic engineering circles and active in both international industry and academia as a visiting professor at the University of Bristol.

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adequately served. So, back in February this year, with the backing of Stan Boland, NMI chairman and a highly influential and respected high-tech entrepreneur, we decided to hold a conference to test the subject matter and gauge the interest of our members – the IoT Security Summit took place in May, appropriately enough at Bletchley Park, ‘home of the code-breakers’ and now an excellent museum.

We constructed a very high quality agenda with speakers from government agencies, academia and industry and the event was a sell-out. As it was run on the eve of the UK general election, we also held a vote with delegates on whether we should establish a focused activity for IoT security and 97% of those who voted replied yes.

That, together with the discussions we had in the execution of the summit gave us the demand signal and the mandate to do something. We then followed through by forming a peer group to look at what that something should be.

Progress was rapid and we quickly formed a steering board from across senior levels of the tech industry and academia. Once we had gained a degree of consensus and sight of what we needed to do, we invited John Haine to become the chair, recognising his vast technical and management experience. The IoT Security Foundation was then formerly launched on September 23rd at the Digital Catapult in London – again to a packed venue. We outlined the need for such an initiative, the things we are seeking to do - and almost as importantly, the things we will not do - and our initial priorities. We also announced the executive steering board composed of senior security experts from large companies such as Vodafone, BT and Imagination Technologies, together with SME’s – Secure Thingz and Copper Horse. We also boast one of the UK’s best infosec academics from Royal Holloway, University of London. So we’re off the blocks, we have our mission, initial set of priorities, a non-profit membership model and critical mass on the executive steering board which we will expand and add more diversity to.

create something that others could build on, with an open and pro bono ethos.

So where are we now? At the start of December, we hold our very first conference at the IET in London with an excellent cast of speakers and many attendees booked. On the membership front, we already have over 40 companies and academic institutions signed up, including a number of "blue chips" currently in the process of joining. But our fees are variable, depending on the size of the company – we also want to attract the start-ups that will probably drive innovation in the IoT. We’re essentially targeting three communities: the producers of the technologies; the adopters of the technologies they produce – the businesses; and, finally, the end users who will increasingly be ordinary consumers.

We also recognise the danger of ‘trying to boil the ocean dry’ when it comes to solving all the problems of securing the IoT and so are looking to focus, at least initially, on a few specific objectives and initiatives.

Firstly, there’s the all-important issue of consumer confidence. Many companies – toymakers, white goods manufacturers and so on are all now rushing to add connectivity to their products – and often in sectors where the price of the final product is a major selling point. They need education and support to make sure that their mistakes don’t damage their customers.

Secondly, there are some specific issues of concern already emerging, for example the problems that arise when devices need to be updated and patched to protect against new attacks. This is a Sisyphean task at the best of times, even when you’re talking about devices with lots of memory, processing power and accessible bandwidth. But the IoT will include millions of devices that are very constrained in memory, processing and energy – how do we protect these?

JH: I’ve been involved with aspects of the IoT for a number of years now, most recently with u-blox where I've been working on new cellular standards for IoT connectivity. While security issues have obviously always been important in cellular, it wasn’t really until our Bletchley symposium that I fully realised just how vulnerable we were becoming, hearing tales about hacked toys, cars and utility infrastructures and recognising that soon almost everything was going to become connected and so vulnerable.

Finally, as ever, comes the thorny issue of standards. These are best left to those bodies that already do it and we have absolutely no intention of treading on their toes. What we want to do is concentrate on best practice, explaining what standards to use and how to apply them; and how to build security into products and companies by design rather than as an afterthought. We want to promote a lightweight certification scheme that can give all players in the value chain a level of confidence that the company, its design and manufacturing processes and its products and services adhere to well-established security principles and procedures. We don’t want to create new standards – we want to raise existing ones!

We were also all aware of how all too easily industry organisations can become incestuous talking shops that never really achieve their initially lofty goals, so we consciously chose the word Foundation as representing our intention to

Our mantra is "making it safe to connect", and we want to promote security first, designed in at the start; fit for purpose, right-sized for the application; and resilient, throughout the product's operating life.

IoT Now: Shifting to the other John now, what’s your perspective on IoT security and where and how do you think that the IoT SF can help?

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We’re essentially targeting three communities: the producers of the technologies; the adopters of the technologies they produce – the businesses; and, finally, the end users who will increasingly be ordinary consumers

John Moor, VP, NMI

John Haine, chair, IoT SF

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EXPERT OPINION

The role of academia in IoT security – a rear view mirror into the future?

When it comes to the security of the IoT, it makes sense to look for allies and, just as Bletchley Park did during WW2 to crack the Enigma code, where better to go than academia, writes IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis. Cooperation between industry and academia might not always go smoothly, but when it does, the results can change society and many of the high-tech tools we take for granted today started life in a university laboratory. What’s more, academic research can prove invaluable to business, providing what one industry-academia liaison manager once described to me as “a rear-view mirror into the future”.

While improving links between academia and industry is something that we at IoT Now are keen to cover in the future, we thought that we’d take this opportunity to do a quick and very superficial snapshot of some security-related IoT research currently underway in the UK. For Kenny Paterson, Professor of Information Security, Royal Holloway, University of London and on the board of the IoT Security Foundation (IoT SF), “The IoT has great promise, but also great potential for tragedy if it isn’t appropriately secured. The IoTSF is taking a leading role in promoting awareness of the security issues that IoT throws up, bringing together the leading players, and setting the agenda for how the industry should approach security for IoT – and academia has a key role to play in this endeavour.

Paterson adds, “Academia's viewpoint is by nature longer-term than that of manufacturers and service providers. While universities today do face market pressures, they are not of the same magnitude as those felt by companies in the IoT rush to market. Academia is also, in principle, vendor-neutral. This means that academics can and do - act as critical voices, will take apart IoT systems, and, subject to a process of responsible disclosure, publish their results. Additionally academia is a reservoir of experience and deep knowledge that can be applied to help tackle the fearsome security problems that IoT systems will bring.”

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He concludes, “Academia - and UK academia especially - is well placed to respond. The UK's main research funding body, RCUK, in combination with several other partners, is putting around £40 million into the area over the next three years. The intention is to bring about a step-change in the broad research areas of cyber security, designing in trust, privacy, security and resilience associated with the IoT. A £9.8 million "Research Hub" in the area of privacy and trust for the IoT is one of the major initiatives in this programme. The IoT SF will seek to partner with the winning consortium of universities, as part of fulfilling its mission of making the IoT secure, aiding its adoption and maximising its benefits.”

Philip Mills, business development manager at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University, Belfast, comments, “The connection of a vast range of devices and people introduces some serious security questions. How can I be sure of the identity of the person or device I am communicating with? How can I be sure that the communication channel is secure? How can I be assured that the data I share will only be accessed by those who have the right to access it? CSIT is at the forefront of technology research to find answers to those questions, employing more than 50 researchers academics, research assistants and PhD candidates - across three complementary research strands. These three research programmes are also supported by an ▼

Academia's viewpoint is by nature longerterm than that of manufacturers and service providers

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

engineering and commercial team of over 20 people who provide market engagement with companies like Thales, BAE Systems and Roke Manor Research to ensure the research addresses real-world problems, and that the results have impact in the marketplace.

Mills explains, “Firstly, The Device Authentication programme looks at technologies for the secure authentication of hardware components, including PicoPUF, a tiny semiconductor IP core that can provide a secure, unique digital fingerprint for even the cheapest microchips. This group also leads SAFECRYPTO, a project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme, which investigates technologies which will guarantee the long term security of ICT systems through advanced encryption techniques. The Secure Ubiquitous Networking programme looks at the security issues presented by large, complex and diverse communications networks, including the challenge of real-time threat detection, countermeasures and rapid recovery. The Security Analytics and Informatics group examines the application of machine learning, real-time graph analysis and artificial intelligence techniques to the huge data sets that exist within the IoT and uncovers technologies for creating actionable intelligence from such data. These three programmes come together in pursuit of a vision of making the Internet - and the IoT - a safe, secure and dependable place for everyone.”

Dr Kevin Curran is a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Ulster, group leader for the Ambient Intelligence Research Group and IEEE Technical Expert for Internet/Security matters since 2008. He advises, “Academics can continue to work on consultancy, joint funded projects and sit on task boards. Of course the research papers help enormously. Many of the flaws in modern devices and systems are found by academics who, for the most part, publish responsibly by first allowing the people who own the device/system or algorithm to fix it before they release the details of the flaw to the world.

“Recently a Russian website provided links to 73K+ devices,” he adds. “We are all aware of the excellent Shodan HQ search engine which focuses on compromised IoT devices. We’ll start to see more threats with the arrival of smart locks, driverless cars, car GPS, car dashboards, car diagnostics etc. In the medical arena, we could see compromised IoT medical devices such as insulin pumps, heart rate monitors, ventilators and blood chemistry analysis machines. There is a CSI episode where someone gets killed through hacking a heart pacemaker. I wonder has this ever happened – and how would we know?”

Curran also flags the commercial pressures that vendors and developers are under: “Of course,

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

the main problem is the worry about getting product to market. Manufacturers are taking products designed for private networks and placing them online for a quick sale. Often these devices have no way to be upgraded. That is the cardinal sin of security! Updates are the only weapon we have. Those in the industry know that many IoT devices have neglected the end-to-end security aspect. The main reason is that many of the embedded devices do not simply have enough computing power to implement all the relevant security layers and functionality necessary. There is then the actual heterogeneity of devices and the lack of industry or de facto standards for connecting the IoT.” For Professor Carsten Maple, director for Cyber Security research at the WMG Cyber Security Centre, University of Warwick, UK, it’s the sheer size and complexity of the IoT world that also poses problems: “Such complex interconnected and interdependent business systems create challenges for assuring security and resilience.

When I co-authored the SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency) -supported UK Security Breach Investigations Report in 2010, I found that 18% of all breaches occurred through a business partner.

Subsequent reports have found much higher percentages. In systems where many different components and infrastructure are connected, the attack surface becomes difficult to manage.”

Professor Kenny Paterson, University of London

Philip Mills, Queen’s University, Belfast

Professor Maple adds, “A further challenge for the successful adoption of IoT requires recognition that there are a great number of competing objectives to balance. Business wish to be quick to market, but ensuring product and system security takes time. When is a product or service secure enough? The data accumulated in an IoT environment can be useful for maintaining a persistent identity, thereby enhancing service, but this comes at a cost to consumer privacy. We will have very powerful systems that can benefit consumers greatly but, as the complexity grows, can we really ensure that there is informed consent for usage of data generated by a consumer?”

Dr Kevin Curran, University of Ulster

And of the role that universities can play, Maple says: “Academia is working hard with industry to find solutions to these pressing issues. It is expected that there will be a new research hub announced in the next 12 months that will unite government, industry and academia in this effort.

Academics are keen to lead the charge in developing multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and multi-lateral approaches to understanding and tackling the problem. The WMG Cyber Security Centre at the University of Warwick is just one example of a group working with leading industrial and academic partners in areas such as defence, transport, construction and smart cities to make a significant impact in ensuring the security and resilience of IoT systems.”

Professor Carsten Maple, University of Warwick

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ANALYST REPORT

IoT SECURITY - perilous, porous, up-close and personal

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CONTENTS

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38 COMPANY PROFILES

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TELIT ON BRINGING TRUST TO THE IoT

GEMALTO ON SECURITY AND DATA PRIVACY

ANALYST REPORT 30

IoT NOW INSIGHT REPORT Our series of specially commissioned Insight Reports continues with Laura DiDio, Strategy Analytics director of IoT and Analytics Enterprise Research and Consulting taking a look at the emerging threat profiles out there for the IoT – specifically across the highly personal sectors of connected cars and healthcare. She unearths some worrying findings about our current state of awareness of these issues and shares some best practice advice on how to resolve them.

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COMPANY PROFILES Telit’s, AT&T’s and Gemalto’s offerings in security are explained

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INTERVIEW Laetitia Jay, Gemalto’s VP of M2M Solutions and Services on IoT security and trust

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INTERVIEW Mihai Voicu, CSO of Telit Communications PLC, on establishing trust on the IoT’s frontiers

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ANALYST REPORT

IoT Security: perilous, porous, up-close and personal The Internet of Things offers greater opportunities - but in interconnected environments, security risks increase exponentially The IoT provides great efficiencies and opportunities, but in connecting myriad sensors, devices, applications, people and ecosystems, it also creates greater security and data privacy risks. Laura DiDio of Strategy Analytics forecasts that there will be 35 billion connected devices by 2022.

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IoT Security/Data Privacy integration and interoperability with legacy and existing systems - exacerbated by the current dearth of standard APIs and protocols - also topped the list of technical challenges cited by respondents to Strategy Analytics earlier IoT 2015 Deployment and Usage Trends Survey which polled over 400 businesses worldwide in June 2015. IoT security concerns were called out by 40% of organisations as presenting the singularly biggest impediment to IoT deployment. One-third – 33% - of participants said integration and interoperability concerns offered a potential roadblock to their IoT projects.

Security issues have not become any easier in the last six months. Indeed, they have become more complicated as IoT mainstream deployments have picked up.

Both surveys found that the interconnection of IoT-enabled devices – including employer and employee owned BYOD mobile have created more “moving parts.” This results in greater complexity and more things for already overburdened IT departments to manage from the

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The Strategy Analytics 2016 IoT Security Threats and Trends Survey which polled 600 global organisations in November 2015 found that corporate security and IT professionals are frustrated and feel hampered by the lack of both capital expenditure and operational expenditure budget for IoT security items; having to justify and beg for security budgets and resources to management if they haven’t had a catastrophic incident. The corporate security IT administrators also feel powerless in the face of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and mobility phenomena which have given rise to new security issues.

Additionally, survey respondents cited their growing concern that in IoT ecosystems the attack surface has increased exponentially and there are many more things to secure: sensors, devices, servers, applications, mobile devices, endpoints/perimeters (e.g. firewalls, gateways, switches, routers, etc.) and track, with multiple vendors and service providers to deal with. The situation is further complicated by the lack of standards and the fact that the existing protocols like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) are, in some instances, inadequate to defend against the latest security threats.

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As Figure 1 indicates, Strategy Analytics 2016 IoT Security Threats and Trends Survey found that 27% of the 600 respondents indicated that their organisations have experienced a security breach within the last 12 months, compared with 40 percent who indicated they had not been hacked.

Figure 1: Has your firm experienced an attempted or successful hack to its IoT applications, devices or network in the past 12 months?

6%

40%

27%

No Yes Unsure We have no way of knowing

27%

Source: Strategy Analytics December 2015

Among the other Strategy Analytics 2016 IoT Security Threats and Trends Survey highlights: • 56% majority of survey participants indicated that end user carelessness represents the biggest security threat in IoT environments. That was followed by 42% who cited Malware and 32% who said Spyware and 29% who called out organised hackers.

• One in 10 or 11% of survey respondents said their firms had experienced a severe or moderate attack on their IoT environments that had resulted in data loss, data privacy breaches and disrupted network operations for hours or days.

• Seven out of 10 businesses spend only between 0% to 20% of their time securing their devices, applications and networks. By contrast only a 7% minority of companies devote 50% or more of their time to security and data privacy.

• A 58% majority of survey respondents said they are

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

strengthening their security in response to the rise in attacks by organised hackers as devices and applications are increasingly interconnected via IoT • Organisations have wildly divergent security budgets: 19% of survey participants said they spend $1 million to over US$20 million on security annually compared with 10% of respondent who spend less than US$100,000 each year and 19% who don’t have a separate security budget.

The IoT threat landscape in perspective There’s no doubt that the connectivity of the IoT has created a target rich environment for opportunistic hackers. Security vendor Gemalto, which published its Breach Level Index Report, found that 888 data breaches occurred in the first half of 2015, compromising 245.9 million records worldwide. “In IoT environments, everything is interconnected. Data breaches have reached epidemic proportions,” notes Laetitia Jay, Gemalto’s VP of M2M Solutions and Services. She adds, that, “vendors like Gemalto, OEM manufacturers and end users must respond to the threat by being more proactive and producing advanced identity and data protection solutions.”

There are many other statistics that to back up Gemalto’s assertions. AT&T’s Operations Center which also monitors IoT security risks, reported an astounding 458% increase in the number of IoT vulnerability scans during the first nine months of 2015.

And a 2014 Report titled, “Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime” by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that cybercrime is a US$445 billion global industry.

John Moor, director of the IoT Security Foundation a nonprofit based in London, agrees with these assessments and says that security and data privacy issues will be exacerbated

by IoT. The IoT Security Foundation is a new organisation founded in the fall of 2015; its mission is to promote Best Practice in IoT Security and heighten awareness. The foundation already has 40 founder members including British Telecom, Vodafone and Infinium among others.

“IoT security is extremely challenging,” Moor says, “Because of the sheer size and enormous complexity of IoT, organisations are literally in the wild. Add to that the burden of mobile users who are using their own devices – BYOD really equates to Bring Your Own Disaster,” he notes.

No one argues the benefits that a connected IoT environment can deliver: economies and efficiencies of scale; faster more,

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component/device level all the way to the edge or perimeter of the network. Additionally, many IT departments exert little control over their end users and organisations as a whole often lack cogent, compelling computer security policies and procedures governing BYOD, mobility and IoT usage.

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ANALYST REPORT

At this early stage of development more emphasis and attention has been placed on innovation, without fully understanding the security and data privacy implications and risks in an IoT connected environment.

Security cannot be practiced with 20-20 hindsight. It cannot be bolted in afterwards. It must be carefully considered.

The IoT Security Foundation’s Moor concurs. “IoT Security must be embedded up front. Organisations need a solid foundation that incorporates the latest security mechanisms and best practices,” he says, adding “The ugly truth is you can put your best people on it, deploy all the best practices and it only takes one vulnerability to take down a network. So you always have to be prepared.”

In the IoT where everything is interconnected, the chain is only as strong as the proverbial weakest link. In order to defend against and prevent a successful data breach, the organisation, network and specific components, devices and applications must be secure by design; secure by default, secure in usage and secure at rest (where the data is stored).

Secure in usage means the data must be secure during transmission as well.

Mihai Voicu, chief security officer at Telit Communications PLC agrees, noting that organisations cannot consider IoT security from a singular perspective. “You need to determine and align your IoT security needs based on the importance of the application. The business need should determine the level of security,” he observes. “Clearly a corporation will want to devote more resources to their mission critical applications and services.”

Another consideration in IoT environments is that security is constantly changing and evolving. What is secure today may not be secure tomorrow. No one can afford to stand still or rest on their laurels.

“Resilience is crucial,” Moor observes. “Organised crime/hackers look at this as a pure business case. So you make it more difficult and more expensive for them to do business and that can prove to be a very effective deterrent,” he says.

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In all verticals security and data privacy issues must be dealt with in advance of deployments. Additionally, neither security nor data privacy are static. Organisations are well advised to review and update their policies and procedures annually or on an as-needed basis to reflect changing market conditions.

Additionally, businesses should actively engage all of their applicable vendors to discuss cyber-security and data privacy concerns in an IoT environment. One of the most challenging conundrums facing corporations in their IoT environments is the confusion and complexity of dealing with multiple vendors and trying to decide which aspect and which part of their IoT infrastructure to safeguard first. Businesses should insist on having all vendors present during negotiations and make sure that cyber-security and data privacy as well as a well-defined line of responsibility/accountability and governance Terms and Conditions are explicit in the contract. The demand for data privacy will in turn, give rise to yet another specialised IoT service: creating security and data privacy rules and contracts in advance of laws governing these areas.

To reiterate, strong security is absolutely essential in IoT environments and ecosystems, across all classes of users and spanning all vertical markets. But security is absolutely essential in highly regulated IoT market segments like automotive and healthcare where non-compliance can be costly and deadly.

“We need to put the time and resources into IoT security or we could very well be sleepwalking into disaster,” Moor warns.

IoT Automotive Security: driving blind?

It was the Hack heard around the world. This past July Fiat Chrysler issued a voluntary safety recall of 1.4 million vehicles in the United Stated after security researchers performed a live and chilling experiment that showed that one of its cars could be hacked with ease.

The Fiat Chrysler hack emphasised the perilous and porous state of security in an IoT environment where myriad devices, applications and people are interconnected but far from safe.

Disaster may be only a keystroke or a picosecond away.

Specifically, the white hat hacker researchers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, purposely exploited a known security flaw.

The vulnerability enabled the security researchers to assume control of a Chrysler Jeep Cherokee via its Internet-connected entertainment system, which was connected to a mobile data network. A technology reporter was at the wheel of the ▼

efficient access to a wide variety of resources via myriad device types; the ability to reduce and contain costs. However, the IoT consists of different types of systems. The different verticals e.g. smart homes, smart cities, connected cars, and smart buildings all require different connectivity approaches and different security mechanisms.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Chrysler issued a voluntary recall to update the software in affected vehicles and predictably issued a statement saying that hacking its vehicles was a criminal action.

The issue spawned numerous articles, blogs and a copious amount of finger-pointing and public shaming. It’s now six months on and the furor over the Fiat Chrysler IoT automotive hack has yet to subside. This is in stark contrast to security breaches in other IoT verticals like the retail segment that occur with monotonous regularity and yet inspire little outward outrage or behavioral change by the consumer public.

The Fiat Chrysler connected car hack though is fundamentally different from most other IoT verticals. It struck a visceral cord. Because the IoT connected car or automotive IoT segment, much like the healthcare arena quite literally impacts everyone in a very personal way.

Even if you don’t own a car or even drive, you’re likely to be a passenger in a car. And it’s not just an automobile. Other modes of transportation buses, trains and planes - are equally vulnerable and have also been victims of similar hacks in recent years. It’s imperative that the automotive, aerospace and other transportation OEMs address this issue. By 2020, the IoT Foundation’s Moor estimates that “90% of new vehicles will be Internet-connected.”

“The automotive industry has been fixated on safety. But security and safety are not one and the same,” Moor says. “Hackers have the potential in IoT to access everything. That means the automakers have to re-architect everything.”

AT&T is a leader in the IoT market with 25 million connected devices as of September 2015. Of those 25 million devices, nearly 6 million are connected cars, according to Jason Porter, VP of

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AT&T Security Solutions. AT&T has relationships with eight of the world’s leading automakers and the company offers a full IoT security portfolio.

“It takes a collaborative approach to solve IoT security; AT&T is continually working with manufacturers and partners to help improve the IoT security ecosystem,” Porter says.

In order to avert hacks like the Fiat Chrysler situation, Porter says AT&T advises car manufacturers to separate entertainment systems in the car from the system that is managing the car’s core functions. “By separating the telematics from the entertainment system, it helps limit the volume of access points for the bad guys to access the car’s key functions,” Porter says. Furthermore, as connected car technology continues to develops, “our Foundries are researching and developing new innovative security solutions and a comprehensive threat analytics platform that will help us understand and protect against upcoming security threats,” Porter adds.

There’s no doubt that IoT heralds sweeping changes for the auto industry. Automakers will have to build security into their vehicles at every layer to safeguard against hacks ranging from sensors, modules, to single board computers (SBCs), body control modules (BCMs), silicon chips, protocols, APIs, applications, datacenter systems and cloud-based systems.

Safeguarding the entire stack from bottom to top – physical layer to application and network layer to the cloud with “defense in depth” and layered security is no mean feat. It will take a combined, collaborative effort that will be accomplished over years – not months. No one vendor will be able to do it all. Vendors from every sector – semiconductors, hardware devices, OEMs, software, application, database, internetworking, security, cloud providers, security, telecommunications, carriers, services providers, VARs and auto manufacturers will all have a part to play. The semiconductors will require hardware support for secure boot to prevent spoofing and tampering via OTA attack paths. Sensitive chips include BCM and all MCU that impact drivetrain, hydraulics, and any other part of the car that may

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vehicle. The hackers remotely took control of the Cherokee’s various systems by turns: the air conditioning, windshield wipers, radio - and finally they cut the transmission and the brakes, causing the car to slow to a crawl and ultimately slide into a ditch. It’s a good thing this was just an experimental hack. Imagine if it were real.

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ANALYST REPORT

Many of the traditional security vendors like Symantec are addressing the IoT automotive security market. Symantec markets its Embedded Automotive Security Analytics, which is designed to secure the entire vehicle bus, either from an SBC such as an IVI or head unit of any car still in design, or from the OBD-II port of cars already on the road. Symantec also offers a full range of IoT security technologies including Device Certificates, Code Signing, OTA Management, and Roots of Trust that can be utilised for automotive security.

As IoT automotive security threats continue to proliferate expect more vendors to flock to this field. A return to the horse and buggy is not an option.

IoT Security and data privacy in healthcare Key Drivers in the IoT healthcare sector include greater efficiencies, better patient outcomes, faster response times and predictive analytics as hospitals, physicians and insurance companies can analyse and interpret the data. But it also makes IoT security and data privacy all the more imperative.

The healthcare vertical is arguably one of the hottest vertical markets in terms of both overall and IoT spending. Health care expenditures in the U.S. soared to US$3.08 trillion in 2014 up from US$2.919 trillion in 2013, according to statistics released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Additionally, U.S. healthcare officials estimate that hospitals, healthcare corporations, physicians’ offices and clinics will spend approximately US$288 billion over the next decade (2015 to 2025) upgrading and outfitting their networks with IoT-enabled smart health devices, applications and networks.

In general, health care expenditures are expected to rise in 2015 to a record 18% of the U.S gross domestic product (GDP), up from 17.7% in 2014 and 17.4% in 2013, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report.

The boom in healthcare IoT is worldwide. The World Healthcare Organisation (WHO) estimated that the total global expenditure on healthcare was US$6.5 trillion in 2010

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and projects that figure will reach US$10.2 trillion by 2020.

Healthcare drivers include: Home care/Remote Patient Telemonitoring: remote, telecommunications between patients, physicians, clinics and hospitals.

Disease Prevention: IoT-based applications and services dedicated to disease prevention thanks to their inherent focus on cost savings and risk reduction – a move that is heartily supported by insurance providers.

Big Data Analytics: for preventive and predictive analytics to enable physicians, hospitals and clinics to monitor and track changes in patient condition and even predict how the patient’s status may change over hours and days.

Portals: Many hospitals and healthcare centers throughout Europe are seeking ways to synergise their multiple information systems such as cameras, sensors, databases and other data sources. Many European start-ups are deploying portals to integrate thousands of General Practitioners (GPs) and pharmacies in “patient-centric models that enable everything from remote consultations and monitoring to management of medications and tracking results.” So it’s little wonder that IoT vendors view the healthcare segment as “just what the doctor ordered.”

There is a two-pronged approach to IoT Health: the consumer segment which is taking a bottom up approach with pricey - at least for the time being - wearable devices like Fit Bit and the enterprise healthcare IoT segment which is characterised by a top-down approach.

The addition of embedded analytics capabilities in IoT devices, networks and ecosystems provides organisations with a plethora of advantages and business benefits. For starters, it makes them immeasurably more competitive.

Hospitals and healthcare corporations can utilise Big Data Analytics to predict how a seemingly healthy newborn might take a turn for the worse in 24 hours. News organisations and weather channels can use the technology for deeper dives into election coverage or predicting storm tracks.

Organisations increasingly need immediate focused answers to their questions to extract business value and drive better decisions. In healthcare, for example, the move to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can use predictive analytics to provide better quality, faster and more efficient patient care.

Traditional, manual methods of analysing and parsing through

▼

adversely impact safety mechanisms. The sensors and modules will require cryptographic and key management capabilities to authenticate data to prohibit hackers from tampering and taking control. This will not happen overnight or even in the next six to 12 months. But the automakers should address the most urgent and vulnerable items: the WiFi, cellular, wireless modules, the analytics, sensors and the actuators, as well as protecting the security of all datacenter and cloud-based systems.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Unfortunately, there is also a potential downside to IoT connectivity and Big Data Analytics.

Data security breaches are proliferating as quickly as IoT connections and they are as hard to eradicate as the common cold. A 2014 report by the Ponemon Institute found that 94% of healthcare institutions experienced a data breach involving one or more records in the past two years. And on average it costs hospitals and healthcare organisations US$201 for each hacked data record.

Healthcare institutions worldwide are increasingly migrating to entirely automated healthcare systems characterised by Electronic Health Records and Personal Health Records (EHRs and PHRs), clinical data warehousing and advanced databases that are linked in IoT-interconnected ecosystems. To reiterate, these IoT systems offer the potential for greater operational efficiencies, faster responses times, better patient outcomes and improved customer service and the ability to cut costs. Healthcare organisations worldwide are overwhelmed with simultaneously attempting to stay abreast of various government regulations like HIPAA in the U.S. and the Data Protection Directive in the European Union, while deciding which new technologies to deploy; wrestling with budgetary constraints and how best to safeguard their IoT environments from devices to BYOD to the edge/perimeter against the constant onslaught of cyber-attacks.

Most IT departments don’t possess the necessary in-house expertise to proactively address these issues. CIOs, CTOs and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are rarely experts in healthcare compliance regulations.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Demand for IoT Data Privacy spawns tougher regulatory compliance and governance Data privacy is the opposite side of the IoT security coin. The two issues are separate and distinct.

Programs in the U.S. such as the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, Centers for Medicare and Medicate Services and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have introduced a number of regulatory requirements that healthcare providers, insurers and benefit program managers must comply with to receive and process incentive payments and reimbursements. Each regulation requires complying organisations to adopt specific workflows and technology solutions to remain in good standing with the respective governing entities. Organisational compliance is a necessity to remain competitive in healthcare markets and avoid costly financial and criminal penalties and expensive litigation.

In the U.S. the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that regulates HIPAA, can levy a maximum US$1.l5 million per violation. Common causes of violations include: unencrypted data, data stored on insecure devices, employee negligence and non-vetted business associates.

The Data Protection Directive is a European Union (EU) edict implemented in 1995. It regulates the processing of personal data within EU member states, including healthcare data.

Each EU member state must transform the directive into internal law; the directive acts as the crucial component of EU privacy and human rights regulations. EU countries spend over €1 trillion annually providing nationalised healthcare for their citizens. A report by the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network indicates that “€56 billion of these healthcare budgets are lost to fraud in Europe annually and €180 billion globally.” ▼

hundreds of millions of lines of claims data can take a dedicated team of analysts weeks or months. And they may only produce annual or biannual reports. But, by deploying a Big Data predictive analytics solution, a risk management team can run a detailed report in 30 to 60 minutes; provide recommendations to superiors and take immediate action to rectify problems and improve patient care.

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ANALYST REPORT

If a patient’s records are hacked and their data privacy compromised, the consequences can include: identity theft, blackmail, fraud, hijacking of medical records and stealing prescriptions to cite just a few examples.

Data privacy breaches can result in dire consequences for the consumer/patients – who may spend months or years trying to recover. The hospital/healthcare and insurance providers also don’t escape unscathed, though they don’t merit much sympathy, they may face civil, criminal penalties and sometimes fines as well as damage to their reputation for failure to comply with security and data privacy regulations.

The growing requirement for data privacy is in turn fueling demand for yet another specialised IoT service: creating security and data privacy rules and contracts in advance of laws governing these areas. Vendors in this space include familiar chip, software OS and application vendors and traditional security firms such as: Bosch, Cryptography Research, Dell Secure Works, FireEye, Green Hills Software, IBM, Intel/Wind River, McAfee, Microsoft, NXP, QNX/RIM, Red Hat, RSA and Symantec that are active in this space today.

These larger vendors are also developing Security as Service platforms.

There are also myriad types of new, emerging IoT security solutions such as: • Device security • Application security • Data security • Endpoint or perimeter security • Network security • Cloud Security The addressable IoT security market is also segmented on the basis of multiple solution types. They include: • Analytics • Authentication and tracking • Data encryption • Data loss protection (PLP) • Identity and Access Management (IAM) • Intrusion detection and prevention • Device management • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) • Unified Threat Management (UTM) • Vulnerability testing There is also a thriving market for security services and many vendors are expanding their offerings to address the burgeoning IoT market. Among the security services offered:

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• • • • • •

Traditional consulting Managed and hosted services Risk Assessment Security awareness training Threat Analysis Vulnerability Testing

Addressing cyber-security and data privacy issues in advance of launching corporate IoT projects will reduce the organisation’s monetary risk in the event of a data breach and mitigate the threat of litigation to a more acceptable level.

This is a smart and necessary move from both a business, revenue and cost containment perspective.

IoT Data privacy solutions Better safe than sorry. The best prescription for IoT data privacy is to take proactive measures to secure all patient records. This includes X-rays, medical images, documents, files etc. That means using multi-factor authentication and data encryption. Healthcare, hospitals, physician’s offices, clinicians and insurance providers should deploy information lifecycle data protection packages to secure all their EHRs and PHRs as they transfer and transmit them across the IoT ecosystem.

End-to-end security is a must. Organisations must be able to trust and authenticate all documents, deploying digital signature solutions to deliver in-network and out-of-network healthcare providers and ensure the validity of electronic files.

To reiterate, it’s essential to secure and encrypt all confidential patient data from the on-premises datacenters and the cloud to the endpoint and network perimeter. The data should encrypted and secure in transmission and secure at rest.

Organisations should also have persistent policy-based management and access rights that are on a “need to know” basis only. The physician needs to access the patient’s specific medical data, while the insurance provider only needs to know what’s necessary to authorise payment.

Conclusions and recommendations IoT is a disruptive technology. IoT is complex and challenging.

Although many aspects and components of IoT are in use today, IoT security and data privacy will demand that vendors, OEMs and end users step up their game with respect to security and data privacy.

Once again, in a world where devices, applications and people are increasingly interconnected, the attack surface is potentially limitless. Organised hackers have become more proficient and the hacks more pernicious. Mobility and BYOD usage are on the rise and careless users constitute an even bigger threat than malware and organised hackers, according to Strategy Analytics’ latest survey data. ▼

Not surprisingly, data privacy has immediate implications and consequences in the IoT healthcare vertical.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

In specific IoT vertical segments like automotive and healthcare, the security hacks can be accomplished remotely and with stealth. The victims may never know it’s happened until it’s too late.

“IoT is an expanding and an expansive universe; you only need one weak link,” observes the IoT Security Foundation’s Moor. “There are many people and organisations who are security conscious; but there are many for whom security is not an issue. Who owns IoT security? It’s a

shared responsibility we all need to do our part. You are only as good as your supply chain,” he adds.

IoT is here to stay. No one advocates disconnecting from the Internet. However, we must proceed with caution and adhere to best practices for IoT security and data privacy.

Ask yourself: what have you got to lose? How much can you afford to risk? If you don’t defend your data and safeguard your privacy, who will?

Strategy Analytics is a market research and consulting firm that helps clients build defensible, distinctive strategies to win in complex technology markets, on a global and regional scale. Strategy Analytics has a unique combination of researchers, experts and analytics covering supply side and demand side market dynamics.

We deliver accurate market data at a granular level that few companies can match. Our quality data is supported by the expert analysis and superior responsiveness that are vital to client decision making. Market coverage includes: wireless devices, automotive electronics, consumer electronics, enterprise, entertainment and media, defence systems, telecommunications infrastructure, pricing and services. Our focused M2M, IoT, Smart Home and Automotive teams are industry recognised sources of global market infrastructure, device, competitive landscape and value chain insights.

By Laura DiDio, Strategy Analytics director Enterprise IoT Research and Consulting Laura DiDio, Strategy Analytics director of IoT and Analytics Enterprise Research and Consulting is a highly visible technology industry analyst and consultant with over two decades experience in high technology.

Prior to joining Strategy Analytics in Boston she was principal analyst at Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC). She also spent over six years as a Research Fellow at the Yankee Group and four years as a Director/Research Fellow at Giga Information Group.

Ms. DiDio consults extensively with vendors and corporate enterprises worldwide. She also conducts independent and custom surveys on a variety of technology and business topics and does competitive analysis and market forecasts. She is a frequent speaker at industry trade shows and user conferences and is widely quoted in the general, business and trade press.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

37

COMPANY PROFILE

Company Summary Telit Communications PLC, headquartered in London, UK is a global provider of wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and valued added services. Telit has more than 5,000 customers worldwide. It supports its customers and advances its leadership position via its eight global Research and Development (R&D) centres. Telit’s IoT initiatives support a wide variety of vertical industries including: automotive, retail, smart energy, smart transportation and security and surveillance. Telit’s core values are: reliability, quality, customer support, ease of integration and investment protection. Telit has three technology pillars: • Long-range cellular connection of devices to each other and the IoT • Short-to-long range license-free wireless connection of devices to their peripherals, to each other and to long-range gateways • Positional awareness for all connected devices Telit recognises that security is an integral part of IoT. It aims to provide customers with end-to-end security. Telit integrates security into its connectivity modules and into its 2G, 3G, 4G and LTE platforms across all vertical markets.

Company Credentials

Key Differentiators

Telit has focused on security from both a product/solution standpoint as well as a strategic direction for the last decade, notes Mihai Voicu, Telit’s chief security officer, based in Boca Raton, Florida. “We have security at every level and layer of the stack and at every connection point: network security, application security, data security, platform security edge security - it goes as high as the customer needs to protect their data and their assets,” Voicu explains. In IoT environments, where devices, applications and people are interconnected in vast ecosystems, the threat(s) increase exponentially. “Telit’s IoT security is pro-active and positioned for bi-directional communications. It actively works with customers to provide proactive maintenance – on premises and in the cloud. Telit protects and encrypts all data in transit and at rest. Telit security incorporates:

End-to-end security; defense in depth and a focus on security feature in the products as well as in the ongoing operational security. “We don’t rely on third parties. We control end-to-end security. This is crucial across all IoT verticals because they all require a different level of complexity,” Voicu says.

• • • • • • •

Competitive Pressures: Telit has a robust set of role-based access and authentication features. Its goal is to bring security “close to the source”.

While many competitors are content to utilise existing security protocols, Telit is adding an extra layer of IoT security at the application layer. It is committed to delivering end-to-end, bi-directional security from module, to onpremises and cloud throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Encryption Secure networking Session management Permissions Authentication Auditing Validation

PREPARED BY TELIT COMMUNICATIONS PLC

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IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

COMPANY PROFILE

Company Summary AT&T, headquartered in Dallas, Texas is a highly respected global brand. In fiscal 2014, the company reported consolidated revenues of US$132.4 billion. AT&T has over 3.5 million business customers, including nearly all of the Fortune 1000 corporations. AT&T’s Enterprise Business brings its telecommunications expertise to bear in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena including connecting cars, machines and devices.

Company Credentials AT&T is a leader in the IoT market with 25 million connected devices as of September 2015. Of those 25 million devices, nearly 6 million are connected cars, via relationships with nine of the world’s leading automakers.

The company offers a full IoT security portfolio and this includes its AT&T Security Network Gateway (SNG) which delivers a suite of cloud-based security services from a single source. Components of the suite include: • • • •

AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T

Network-Based Firewall Service Secure Email Gateway Service Web Security Service DDoS Defense

Key Differentiators AT&T espouses a “Defense in Depth” approach to IoT Security. According to AT&T, businesses suffered nearly 43 million security incidents in 2014 a 43% increase over the prior year. AT&T’s mantra is “The status quo is not an option.”

AT&T has eight Security Operations Centers which it staffs 24x7, 365 days a year. And it has visibility into over 100.4 petabytes of traffic crossing its network every day. “We have a unique vantage point into the threat landscape and

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

how to help our customers stay ahead,” according to Jason Porter, VP of Security Solutions at AT&T. Furthermore, he adds, “AT&T’s leadership in SDN has enabled it to be a leader in virtualised security functions to match the scale of the ever-growing and fast-paced environment of the IoT. Transitioning security to a software-based service model enables faster deployment of security where it is needed, as well as the ability to scale the network based on data traffic needs. This allows us to extend security into the application layer, to help protect individual applications and data sets, customisable to the customer’s needs”.

AT&T’s takes a multi-layered approach to safeguard IoT connected businesses. This includes: • Protect Intellectual Property (IP) • Sustain operations • Secure sensitive information

Competitive Pressures: AT&T says it saw a 62% increase in DDoS attacks across its network in the last two years. “With an explosion of connected devices, there is an increasing need for security across the industry. All companies must work together to provide an IoT security experience throughout the entire product lifecycle,” Porter says.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company Summary Gemalto, headquartered in North Holland, the Netherlands, is one of the most world renowned and widely respected international digital security companies. Gemalto delivers a wide range of security solutions including software applications, managed services and devices including smart cards and tokens and is the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards. The company had revenue of €2.5 billion in 2014. It is also a global brand, with 14,000 employees representing 116 nationalities and operates in 46 countries worldwide. The company’s motto: “We help people to trust one another in an increasingly connected digital world.”

Company Credentials

Key Differentiators

As Laetitia Jay, Gemalto’s VP of M2M Solutions and Services says, “Security is at the heart of Gemalto’s business and raison d’etre”. Gemalto’s Breach Level Index Report found that 888 data breaches occurred in the first half of 2015, compromising 245.9 million records worldwide. “In IoT environments, everything is interconnected and in the Digital Age, people are increasingly mobile and they expect to be able to access their data anytime, irrespective of geographic location,” Jay says. At the same time, she notes, “data breaches have reached epidemic proportions, so we at Gemalto have to respond to the threat by being even more proactive and producing advanced identity and data protection solutions.”

Gemalto’s portfolio of data encryption solutions deliver multi-factor authentication and key management capabilities that extend protection and ownership across the lifecycle of sensitive data as it is created, accessed, shared, stored and moved. From the data centre to the cloud, enterprises can remain protected, compliant and in control, no matter where their business takes them, Jay says. Gemalto also recognises that organisations and their IT departments, particularly those in heavily regulated verticals like banking/finance, defense, government, healthcare, insurance, retail and transportation – are not always experts in compliance. Therefore, she says, Gemalto’s portfolio of compliance regulations and mandate solutions can take the administrative and cost burdens and guesswork off the corporation and ensure that they are compliant in their chosen fields via Gemalto’s layered approach which is called the Compliance Infrastructure. This can save businesses huge sums in potential fines and penalties.

Gemalto has a full suite of identity and data protection solutions for enterprise security. They enable organisations to assume a data-centric approach to security and control access to the infrastructure and applications. Businesses can create the levels of trust and authentication that align to their business needs for their on-premise as well as public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Gemalto security solutions include: • • • •

Identity and access management Data encryption Crypto management Cloud security

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Competitive Pressures: “You can’t concentrate on any one point of the network in IoT to the exclusion of all else,” Jay says. “At Gemalto, we focus on best practices overall. Security is never static. It’s constantly evolving just to keep pace with the threats and the hackers.”

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

INTERVIEW

Gemalto: Charting security and data privacy in the IoT environment In the IoT, where devices, applications, people and ecosystems are interconnected, the threat of a security hack or a data privacy breach has risen exponentially because there are far more “moving parts” to secure and the environment is much more complex. The IoT offers the potential for greater opportunity but it also raises concerns of security and data privacy for OEMs, corporate enterprises and an increasingly mobile user population.

Laetitia Jay, VP of M2M Solutions and Services at Gemalto, tells Strategy Analytics analyst Laura DiDio how her company is helping its corporate customers tackle and manage the challenges of IoT security and data privacy.

LJ: The difference between M2M security and IoT security is that the latter vision is broader and much more all-encompassing, crossing traditional boundaries between companies, industry sectors products and services. And, in an IoT environment, when you add end users to the equation through connected cars, wearables, smart homes and even smart cities, the security aspect becomes much more critical. There’s far more at stake, including a host of other issues like data privacy, identity theft and, depending on the vertical markets involved, even potential public safety and public health issues.

LD: How would you describe your role overseeing M2M and IoT security at Gemalto?

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

LJ: I’ve been at Gemalto for 19 years. Since the early 1990s, security has always been at the heart of Gemalto’s business. It’s our top priority in terms of our products and solutions – payment cards, health cards, SIMs, secure elements - and also in terms of our core customer base, the mobile network operators and financial institutions, amongst others. My role is about helping our customers – and their customers manage security from the edge to the core. As we’ve seen in the payment industry over the last two decades, entire systems can be hacked through just one vulnerability. You can’t concentrate on just one single point in the network so Gemalto therefore focuses on applying best practice throughout all the many domains involved. That said, you also have to be realistic. Absolute security is difficult to achieve and corporations must strike a balance between cost, risk and effort. They must align their ▼

LD: What are the differences between security in an M2M environment and security in an IoT environment?

41

INTERVIEW

LD: How have security threats changed in the last two to three years and what impact has that had on Gemalto’s strategy?

LJ: Headlines in the news show end users the risks they are taking by being connected. As a result, many industries are finally moving from complacent self-denial and are becoming aware of threats and what damage attacks can do to long-established brands. This is especially true of specific verticals like the automotive and energy markets. End users are thinking for themselves and are pushing government regulators to enact tougher laws, often through consumer advocacy groups.

Other IoT vertical industries can however still be very lax, blind or careless. Data privacy and data ownership responsibilities are often extremely diffuse and unclear in the IoT world and that’s why you need to ensure trust across the entire value chain and from multiple perspectives.

Organisations need to authenticate their data across the whole IoT environment, irrespective of what type of network technology is involved. It’s also crucial for companies to be able to guarantee the confidentiality of that data and ensure its integrity in that it hasn’t been corrupted and that it is trustworthy.

Gemalto has specific products and services designed to ensure the security and data privacy of our customers’ IoT networks

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Gemalto has specific products and services designed to ensure the security and data privacy of our customers’ IoT networks. Our security experts can run end-to-end security assessment and White Box and Black Box penetration testing, providing a risk evaluation assessment so that customers know the likelihood of attacks and are conscious of their specific vulnerabilities. They can then put in place security countermeasures appropriate for their business. Gemalto provides recommendations based on our ´Security by Design´ approach with its principles applied right from the first stage planning of a new product or service. As well as a wide range of security products, we also provide full lifecycle management of security credentials and security infrastructures. Security also needs to be constantly patched and updated remotely as threats evolve and this has strong product design implications if we want to prevent OEMs from having to recall thousands of products.

LD: Can you describe Gemalto’s approach to IoT security?

JL: Gemalto believes that IoT security is really all about having a trusted exchange of data between a device or user and a network or the cloud, or between a user and another user through a network: the way to protect this is by having a trusted digital identity. There are ultimately three pillars when it comes to data security: integrity, authentication and confidentiality. With integrity, we ensure that the data which will be transferred can´t be modified or corrupted. We must also be certain of its source: are we certain it originates from the right person or device, and is that person or device who they claim to be? This is what we ensure through our authentication solutions. In terms of confidentiality, we guarantee privacy and limit the availability of data to pre-specified individuals or organisations.

LD: In IoT environments where everything – people, devices and applications - are increasingly interconnected and the “threat vector” has grown exponentially, security is specifically challenging. How do corporations cope?

LJ: We’re moving from siloed industries to a world where everything is interconnected and devices are also interconnecting industries. The attack surface available to hackers is essentially exploding outwards. To mitigate risk you need best practice – and authentication and identification are key building blocks. For example, in healthcare in the USA, you have a medical device which is ingesting and storing critical patient information – but also sharing it with three main entities or individuals who also need access i.e. the doctor, the hospital administrator and the insurance company. But all three of those people shouldn’t have access to the same pieces of patient information.

Corporations need to think of their ecosystem in its entirety and ensure that their infrastructure is protected where it matters and when it matters.

Any neglected device can open a door to a complete ecosystem - this is why we recommend a rigorous assessment of the whole system and its various stakeholders.

LD: Can you provide specific details of how Gemalto delivers end-to-end security, identity protection and authentication? ▼

security initiatives with their business needs and decide what assets need to be secured and what elements don’t need to be protected with the same rigour as their core systems.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Laetitia Jay is VP of M2M (Machine to Machine) Solutions and Services at Gemalto. In this role, she is in charge of defining and implementing the service and product offerings strategy for Gemalto’s M2M business unit.

Laetitia Jay holds an engineering degree from Polytech Clermond-Ferrand.

LJ: We protect the user’s identity throughout the entire communication chain. This begins with the keyboard asking you for a password or confirmation from a fingerprint sensor to access the cloud. Exchanges of information with the network should all be encrypted, using encryption keys and authentication software on both the device and network sides. Gemalto´s Secure Elements can be used on the device side and Hardware Security Module (HSM) on the server side. Gemalto deploys dynamic random challenges-responses so that each side “proves” its ID to the other side without replaying the same exchange of information twice.

To further reduce the risk of massive attacks and enable fast communications, we execute the user identification process locally within the device that’s in the user’s actual possession. This is what happens when a person pays with their EMV Chip and PIN payment card at a store and their payment is immediately accepted. When you type in your secret PIN, your payment card checks it directly, accepts the transaction after specific checks and generates a digitally signed authorisation that will be sent to the bank, so you don’t have to stand in line waiting for confirmation in real-time. These types of strong authentication have become industry standards and those secure computer chips running dedicated security software and protecting identity credentials have been deployed in their billions to become part of our everyday lives.

By delivering those secure elements and the supporting authentication and identity credential management, Gemalto provides all the components companies need to establish trust in digital interactions with them. Unfortunately, those computers and mobile devices we use to access the networks often have weak built-in security mechanisms, so the number of successful security hacks and penetrations is steadily increasing. Security, in and of itself, is not that complex. Instead, it’s the implementation of security that is complex in this interconnected world.

LD: Can you describe Gemalto’s Digital Security Solutions and how your company differentiates its products and its strategy from competitors’ solutions?

LJ: Deploying security can be difficult for a device maker or service provider. Once again, the

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

key is to ensure certificate identity. Gemalto delivers end-to-end security from the core to the edge. We add software in our devices and secure elements, protecting against physical and digital attacks and providing the security credentials for the device itself. We also secure the network, making sure the right data is sent to the right person or device. Our Gemalto security solutions suite incorporates all the necessary software and secure elements needed to run authentication and encryption for each interaction. We also ensure remote lifecycle management over the lifetime of the device.

Corporations

LD: Can you provide us with some best practice advice and tips for securing corporate networks and digital assets in IoT networks?

taking

should start with a risk-based security assessment. Be very aware of your corporate data assets and know the risks you are

JL: Corporations should start with a risk-based security assessment. Be very aware of your corporate data assets and know the risks you are taking. Many corporations simply don’t know how bad and how massive the consequences of a security breach can be. They’re almost always surprised at how fast and how easily their systems can be compromised and penetrated.

Companies are always surprised by what they don’t know. The reality is that in the digital age, many systems can be hacked in half a second.

LD: Are there any “must-have” devices or security services in M2M and IoT networks?

JL: Security must be considered as a must-have today. It represents a process, starting from the very first steps of a connected device deployment, all along its long lifecycle where security updates will most probably be needed.

Security should never be seen as a single cost or an afterthought, but rather as a great business enabler, making sure a company is adaptive enough to cope with future new threats and to embrace new business models. Although the type of security products and the level of security services a company elects to deploy depends on a number of specific factors – vertical market type, level of risk sensitivity, governmental regulations authentication products are definitely a musthave. The level of security should always align with the company’s business goals and the amount of risk that they are willing to assume.

The higher the threats and risks, the more a company should have a secure infrastructure that follows the key security pillars – device authentication, data integrity and confidentiality.

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CREATE THE FUTURE

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iotglobalnetwork.com

INTERVIEW

The principles of security – bringing trust to the fractal frontiers of the IoT A lot of the current IoT hype envisions a world where we humans will be able to glide serenely though our lives, effectively kept afloat and supported by any number of smart devices and smart environments. However, just like ducks on a pond, there’s also going to be some frantic paddling going on beneath the waterline to keep us safe and secure in an infinitely interconnected world.

It was against this somewhat unnerving backdrop that IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, sat down to talk with Mihai Voicu, CSO of Telit

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Communications PLC. Mr Voicu also holds a number of security-related posts within standards organisations such as the TIA’s TR-50 – M2M Smart Device Communications community and proves his credentials as a ‘good guy’ with an official certification as an Ethical Hacker.

IoT Now: The network environment for most of the last century was effectively twodimensional, connecting entity A with entity B. While the internet has obviously moved things into a much more multi-dimensional terrain, the IoT extends that even further. What challenges is that posing for experts like yourself and the wider IoT sector?

Mihai Voicu, Chief security officer, Telit Communications PLC

MV: It’s certainly true that IoT principle are now being applied to almost anything one can think of – from the intimately personal, such as medical and fitness applications, right through to what ▼

While telecommunications has always been regarded as part of any country’s critical national infrastructure, the IoT’s sheer pervasiveness in the ways that it’s going to touch every aspect of our lives increases that criticality. While the ancestors of today’s hackers – the phone phreakers of the 1960s who used whistles and tone generators to make international calls for free – weren’t malicious as such, the threat profile has grown alarmingly in recent years. There’s clear evidence that organised crime and narco-terrorist syndicates now have their own R&D operations set up to penetrate the world’s networks, while coordinated nation-to-nation cyberwar attacks already seem to have happened, despite diplomatic denials by the accused parties.

45

INTERVIEW

level, where data is actually acquired via sensors or where actuators may interact with the surrounding physical world

are almost planetary perspectives - sensing earthquakes, wave movements and weather. In between is ever-expanding range of settings, many now qualified by the addition of the adjective ‘smart’ – whether they truly deserve that term at the moment or not – such as Smart Cars, Smart Homes, Smart Lighting, Smart Parking, Smart Cities and so on. To complicate matters even further, there’s already considerable interaction between these different settings – interaction that can only continue to increase as we try to realise the benefits that can come from integrating information flows and exploiting the ensuing big data.

Although that looks like an intimidatingly diverse set of separate problems and vulnerabilities to resolve when it comes to security, things start to become clear if you apply Occam’s trusted Razor and bring things down to their simplest common elements.

From this perspective, we can clearly see that most IoT deployments are composed of three shared but distinct domains: data acquisition from the ‘Things’; data communications over the supporting wired and wireless networks; and the data processing, which is increasingly taking place in the cloud.

Vulnerabilities can occur in any of these domains and so any effective security solution must be truly all-encompassing and end-to-end if it’s to have any chance of protecting that particular IoT environment.

IoT Now: So what are the approaches and policies that Telit adopts for each one of these domains?

MV: At the “Thing” level, where data is actually acquired via sensors or where actuators may interact with the surrounding physical world, trusted partners make up a key component of Telit’s offerings and we work closely with them to

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ensure that they have similar levels of security embedded into their products to those we have in the rest of our infrastructure. In some situations this will involve the use of specialised agents developed by us that encrypt data at source in the chip and there are techniques that we use that protect the chip even against the use of probes that can monitor its internal processes.

On top of that, these agents allow solutions builders to strictly control exactly when, where and how this data should be sent, adding yet another level of protection against external attack.

At the “Connectivity” level, our solutions continue to support that end-to-end protection, while also adding an important ability to alert customers to any form of attack over a cellular network in real time. Additionally, we’ve developed specialised Access Point Names (APNs) – the gateways that link cellular networks with the other networks and resources – that ensure safe segregation of customers using the same network. Similarly, VPNs are used to secure the links between cellular service providers and cloud providers.

Cellular networks can however be vulnerable to a number of different types of attack such as SMS spoofing, DNS poisoning and Denial of Service (DoS). Here, Telit’s Shield service can block and report these types of attack as well as the attacked module’s identity and its location. These events can then be analysed, remedial and protective measures taken, and users and customers alerted through various means.

Finally, there are the security disciplines that we apply at the all-important “Cloud” level where Telit has partnered with SaaS providers such as Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. This is where our Application Enablement Platform (AEP) resides – a development environment that allows customers to create their own solutions, manage their devices and connectivity and store their data. ▼

At the “Thing”

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

IoT Now: While that sounds eminently sensible in theory, surely each particular domain is a universe unto itself with different supporting technologies, different security challenges and potentially different types of attack surface?

Compounding things still further is that many of the settings that you mentioned above have technical standards bodies, regulations and indeed legally established responsibilities that are specific to that particular sector – I’m thinking of the automotive, healthcare and aviation industries, just for a start. How do you add those variations into the mix?

MV: With the breadth of customers that Telit has, we get involved wherever possible with standards and industry bodies at multiple levels as both direct contributors and as observers. Two key bodies on the networks and telecoms side are the GSMA and the TIA. Through the TIA and the work on the TR-50 standards committee - especially the security technical bulletin published in 2012 Telit made significant contributions to the US Cyber Security Bill.

There’s a growing acronym soup out there of councils, associations and groups all involved

with different aspects of the IoT – but no one single body yet that you can go to that’s solely focused on the security of the IoT. IoT Now: Given the sheer complexity of the value chains involved, can you talk a little about the role that the AEP plays in ensuring security and the techniques involved?

MV: Certainly. What we’ve done with the AEP is to put control of the security environment directly into the hands of the developers, providing them with almost infinite flexibility to grant or restrict access to applications, data and things that’s unparalleled in the rest of the IoT sector and in broadly similar solutions.

The next level of security embedded in the AEP resides in the actual identity of the things, such as stand-alone IoT devices or gateways, and here keys are used

For example, we use “application tokens” – there can be many of these assigned to a customer and they belong only to that organisation. These are used by any entity that requires access to a thing definition stored in the cloud such as gateways, third party applications or simple IoT devices themselves and each application token can have one or more roles. Things will use the application token to identify where the data needs to go and are part of the overall authentication process. The same mechanism is used when authorised third party applications also connect to the cloud.

The next level of security embedded in the AEP resides in the actual identity of the things, such as stand-alone IoT devices or gateways, and here keys are used. A “thing key” is a unique identifiable entity such as the source of the data.

Since it is possible for things to send data to one or more places, these aren’t attached to specific organisations and the identity of the data being sent to one or more organisations is controlled by the application tokens. Examples of thing keys include IMEI numbers (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity – a unique 15 digit code used to identify devices connected to cellular networks), MAC (Media Access Control)

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The AEP runs in an ultra-secure state and is supported by a number of techniques. For a start, all inbound connections from things or applications are secured with TLS 1.1 or 1.2 encryption, while all connections with mobile network operators use rolling keys over VPNs to ensure safe links. Only our customer themselves know the keys that secure their data in the cloud.

From Telit’s side of the relationship, our support, maintenance and operations teams employ rolebased security principles with segregated duties to limit and track access to sensitive functions or data. Additional security features also exist – some of which we obviously don’t talk about publically – and these are based on best practice principles from major industry organisations such as the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance).

IN ASSOCIATION WITH TELIT IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

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INTERVIEW

addresses, or any other key that can be securely attached to a device.

Platforms also use “Application IDs” for authentication and while these aren’t visible entities, developers can set this on the initial authentication requests and any sequential calls invoking the thing key must also include the application ID. Interactions between data, things and applications can be controlled by developers in highly granular ways, adding yet another level of security. For example, an application token that is used to update thing properties will only be allowed to use a specific set of APIs so an application token that is used for thing management will only be allowed to access the management API. Finally, we also give our customers the ability and the tools to encrypt their data in transit, right from source to destination, with enterprise agents decrypting the data as it arrives at the destination.

The next level of security embedded in the AEP resides in the actual identity of the things, such as stand-alone IoT devices or gateways, and here keys are used

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IoT Now: And what of the broader strategies that the IoT community must take into account to protect itself and its users and customers?

MV: There’s still a lot to do in terms of educating senior executive decision makers about the importance of their own security advisors and managers. Unfortunately, in the rush to launch new products or services, form partnerships, or expand into new offices or countries – and win their executive bonuses – security experts can become regarded as ‘those awkward people who stop us growing the business and making a profit’. What they should be seen as instead is as

‘business enablers’ – ensuring that when innovation does take place that it doesn’t have the potential to eventually wreck the business and soil its brand. The fact that both enterprise and individual executive legal penalties are starting to rise in the face of numerous data breaches of customer records mean that they can no longer be brushed off.

A company wouldn’t consider for a moment going about its business uninsured –and it probably employs experts to monitor and manage its exposure to risk. IoT security must be approached in similar ways. At Telit, for example, we regularly carry out intensive audits of our own threat horizons. At the end of the day, all the security tools that we require are already there – and there’s not a single shining white knight of cyber security about to come over the horizon to rescue us. What we do need is the discipline and the processes to use what we already have in ways that are specific to each of our organisations – and that sometimes resembles an art, rather than an exact science.

Mihai Voicu serves as chief security officer for Telit Communications PLC and is responsible for the design and implementation of comprehensive and technologically sophisticated corporate security strategies that safeguard customers and Telit IoT Platforms' assets. Mr. Voicu joined Telit IoT Platforms as senior software engineer in 2001 and worked on the initial architecture of the Telit IoT Platforms security product secureWISE Collaborate. He holds a Master of Science in Applied Electronics from Polytechnic Institute, Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications Bucharest, Romania. He also holds CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) and C|EH(Certified Ethical Hacker) certifications.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

EXPERT OPINION

The role of the IoT in the future of the emergency services Many Smart City projects going on around the world at present also have a corresponding ‘Safe City’ angle to them and, given the budgetary pressures that many emergency service providers are under at present, there are important roles that the IoT – and the data that it produces – have to play in improving both efficiency and the cost effectiveness of these essential workers.

Airwave, operator of Great Britain’s emergency services communications network, recently released a white paper ‘Blue Light Futures’, looking at the role that new technologies can play in supporting police, fire and ambulance first responders and their associated back office operations. Alun Lewis, editor of IoT Now, recently spoke with Euros Evans, CTO at Airwave, to get his take on some of the opportunities and challenges in this critical area.

services vehicles heading in other directions on equally critical missions – especially if a major incident is underway. While the technology is here that alerts us to choke points for crowds and vehicles and allows us to tweak train schedules or traffic lights to clear them, they still usually need direct manual intervention. Some police forces already use sound sensors to locate gunshots and fire services can use data from increasingly smart buildings to track the progress of fires.

IoT Now: Euros, many emergency services around the world are already making the shift towards a more data-centric way of working.

Critical voice communications, currently using TETRA or P-25, are now being enhanced by 3G or 4G connected devices as well, with the police, for example, using mobile apps to cut paperwork or bodymount cameras to collect evidence. What’s happening in the IoT context?

Interestingly as well, that other great generator of data in social networking contexts – humans – are also increasingly being collectively monitored.

This isn’t personal surveillance of individuals, but instead involves using software tools to track Twitter and social media for key words that can provide advance warning of civil disturbances or give feedback on how major events like big fires or natural disasters are impacting a community.

EE: At the most personal level – that of the individual responder – there’s a slow but significant trend to exploiting one aspect of the current wearables trend. This can involve monitoring firemen for signs of impending physical distress via heart and temperature monitors so that they can be withdrawn from hazardous situations before they exhaust themselves or overheat. Sensors can also be fitted to a policeman’s gun holster, sending a signal that the gun has been drawn – again signalling to a despatcher that a critical situation is potentially unfolding and must be monitored closely. In medical and paramedic situations, there are also many uses of telemetry techniques to monitor a patient’s life signs and use these to provide remote specialist advice and inform the Accident and Emergency teams before the patient’s arrival.

IoT Now: Some of the examples you used there touch on issues of personal privacy and identity – what are the issues emerging here?

IoT Now: Just judging by the number of conferences now taking place around the world, the subject of Smart Cities seems to be reaching the top of its hype cycle – possibly.

How will these play out from the Blue Light perspective?

EE: One obvious idea that’s been long mooted here and applied in some settings involves what’s known as Greenwave – controlling traffic lights to get emergency services to an incident fast. Great in theory but, if you apply it in a big city, you could end up causing chaos elsewhere as there will almost inevitably be other emergency

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

EE: What’s fast becoming clear is that information privacy can’t be reduced to a simple binary. Instead we should look at it as a series of concentric rings where appropriate data – about your health, your home, your car and so on - can be shared safely and securely with appropriate people at the right time and place and protected the rest of the time. Who wouldn’t want a paramedic to have access to your records if you have a specific health problem, or a business owner allow a senior fireman to be able to access a building’s plans to save further damage. These issues have to be firstly recognised and then discussed between politicians, the emergency services and the communities that they serve.

The IoT is already starting to touch every aspect of our lives and that includes the services that we rely on in the event of personal or civic emergencies.

Euros Evans, CTO, Airwave

Interestingly as well, that other great generator of data in social networking contexts – humans – are also increasingly being collectively monitored

Euros Evans was appointed as CTO for Airwave in May 2008. As well as being responsible for technology, Euros also leads and manages product and solutions development and security.

During his career in the telecommunications industry, Euros has worked in many functions, including marketing, IT, technology and operations and has led and delivered many large complex projects, engaging and managing suppliers both within the UK and off-shore. Euros holds a BA in Mathematics and Computing.

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EXPERT OPINION Hierachy of IoT Thing Needs

Shifting our IoT perspective: what’s Maslow got to do with the IoT? Now is an exciting time to be in the Internet of Things (IoT) space with innovation and growth abounding. Unfortunately, this has led to confusing messages for the average consumer.

Technology seems to lead to discussions around the IoT and, while techies rejoice, real consumers seem confused. As an industry - with a few notable exceptions - we haven't really done a good job at showing how the IoT can become a valued personalised ally to us as individuals. Perhaps we should consider shifting our perspective?

What if we considered ‘things’ as if they were people? We have established paradigms for all aspects of human interactions - what if we considered applying those to our things?

Jim Hunter, Chief scientist, Greenwave Systems

Let’s start by looking at the definition of a thing – and by leveraging the work of my favorite psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow, who outlined the basic needs of human beings with his renowned Hierarchy of Needs diagram. In a TechCrunch article a few months ago, I introduced the Hierarchy of Needs of an IoT ‘thing’, leveraging Maslow’s three key building blocks of self-existence, self-expression and selfactualisation. One of the key takeaways from this article is that security is paramount, even before the thing communicates. As soon as a thing starts to collect information, even if it does not yet have a voice, it must be trusted to safeguard that information.

In things we trust?

Trust is something we demand in anyone we hire or bring into our homes, so perhaps we should consider bringing a new IoT thing into our lives in the same way we hire an employee 50

Trust is something we demand in anyone we hire or bring into our homes, so perhaps we should consider bringing a new IoT thing into our lives in the same way we hire an employee. The traits you look for in an employee translate nicely for things: you must be able to trust your thing; it must do the job it’s hired for; your thing must work well alongside others; and it should fit into the overall culture. If potential employees don’t meet these criteria, then we look elsewhere. If we don’t apply these standards to our things, then we run the risk of relegating ourselves to becoming micromanagers of our technology when in reality we would much rather be the CEO of our lives.

In a job interview, it's also important to know which communication tools a prospective employee is fluent in. When considering things, the current message from the industry is “There’s

an App for that”. What if every employee you wanted to communicate with in your company had their own app - and you had to use their app to communicate with them exclusively? If we already use social media to communicate with humans, why can’t we also use it to communicate with our things? Many paradigms for interactions already exist and we now have an opportunity to leverage these for conversations with our IoT things.

Are you talking to me?

Employees submit their work outputs in the standard corporate ways. Why is the output from our things in a format decided by the thing’s maker? Summaries from your things could be presented in mediums that are friendlier to you, such as images, documents, and other familiar and more human-friendly formats.

The goal of this article is to get us thinking differently about the IoT. Let’s reduce the implicit friction between people and technology and bring technology to the level of the people, rather than force them to fit the technology. If you make things, make sure your things are trustworthy. If you build interactions for things, consider how billions of people around the world already communicate with each other. If you make platforms to tie it all together, make sure you focus on secure, trusted, scalable and extensible design. If you market IoT to the masses, focus less on technology and more on telling the stories of those things that have their own stories to share.

Jim Hunter is chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave Systems, a leading global IoT software and services provider. Jim is a highly regarded IoT technologist having created, patented, and evangelised multiple technologies for a smart connected future and has founded and sold companies in this space to Motorola and Google.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

ADVERTISING FEATURE

IoT on the Edge - Sand, satellites and the Southern Cross Mining operation deploys satellite-based technology to protect workers and minimise environmental impacts A multi-national mining corporation runs the longest continually operating sand mine in Australia. As part of its operations, regular measurement of water quality and levels of bores is required to meet government regulations and minimise any negative impact on the environment.

Other hazards to workers include exposure to high temperatures, risk of dehydration and no access to help in the event of an emergency.

The mineral and metal extraction company turned to Pacific Data Systems, a provider of remote monitoring solutions in Australia, to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end solution capable of collecting, processing and transmitting the required field data to a central location without human intervention needed at the mining site. LevelVUE, the solution designed in-house by Pacific Data Systems, incorporates high-accuracy water sensors, solar technology, a comprehensive web application and a SkyWave IDP-690 satellite terminal that delivers connectivity over the IsatData Pro satellite network for timely and reliable data transmission.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Outback â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but not out of touch The LevelVUE system is self-sustaining. The builtin solar panel provides power, while a backup battery ensures operation for up to two weeks without sun. The SkyWave IDP satellite terminal is IP67 certified and designed to withstand harsh environments, including extreme temperatures and high humidity. As designed, the installed equipment and corresponding services require minimal onsite maintenance and support.

Customisable to meet individual customer requirements, the LevelVUE solution monitors specific parameters and thresholds and sends periodic reports to the operations centre. If the system detects any irregularities or sub-optimal conditions, LevelVUE sets off automatic alarms to alert the appropriate parties to initiate corrective measures. The two-way capabilities of the SkyWave IDP satellite terminal and IsatData Pro network allow operations to control field equipment and make changes to the settings remotely.

The operation centre now has access to historical and real-time data at any time, which enables greater operational visibility and provides information required for efficient planning â&#x2013;ź

Water monitoring, although necessary, can be problematic as the mine is located in an isolated area out of range of cellular networks. Because of its remoteness, sending workers in to get manual readings is expensive and dangerous. The mine is only accessible by foot and the three mile trek there is treacherous with thick vegetation and venomous spiders and snakes.

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ADVERTISING FEATURE

SkyWave IDP-690 as part of the levelVUE remote monitoring system

The operation centre now has access to historical and real-time data at any time, which enables greater operational visibility and provides information required for efficient planning strategies

strategies. The automation of readings also enables the mining company to reduce the number of field visits and gain significant payroll savings. Additionally, the company is improving worker safety, meeting occupational and public safety protocols, and minimising insurance costs including those associated with employee liability claims.

Hitting the satellite sweet spot Satellite-based remote monitoring solutions transform big data into smart, valuable data easily and economically allowing customers to have the right information at the right time regardless of the location of their operations.

According to Paul Gapes, General Manager for Pacific Data Systems, “The transmission and collection of data via a satellite communications link can be very cost effective - as little as A$1 per day. We’re looking to expand this type of application to support multiple sensors.” Pacific Data Systems is also currently looking to support other applications with the same technology, such as monitoring levels at tank farms, creeks, rivers and dams.

About Pacific Data Systems Since 1984, Pacific Data Systems has been providing reliable, cost effective and timely solutions in the area of environmental monitoring, data acquisition, scientific and industrial

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instrumentation, remote computing and system integration. Their mission is “to provide the most comprehensive range of quality solutions for our customers and provide them with the best advice”.

About SkyWave - an ORBCOMM Company SkyWave is a subsidiary of ORBCOMM Inc. (Nasdaq: ORBC) a leading global provider of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication solutions and the only commercial satellite network dedicated to M2M. ORBCOMM’s unique combination of global satellite, cellular and dualmode network connectivity, hardware, web reporting applications and software is the M2M industry’s most complete service offering.

With over 20 years of innovation and expertise in M2M, ORBCOMM has more than 1.3 million subscribers with a diverse customer base including premier heavy equipment OEMs such as Caterpillar Inc., Doosan Infracore America, Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd., John Deere, Komatsu Ltd., and Volvo Construction Equipment, as well as transportation customers such as Boeing, C&S Wholesale, Canadian National Railways, Carrier Transicold, CR England, Hub Group, J.B.Hunt, Maersk Line, Marten Transport, Prime Inc., Swift Transportation, Target, Tropicana, Tyson Foods, Union Pacific, Walmart, and Werner Enterprises. For more information, visit www.orbcomm.com.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

IOT MASTERCLASS

Policy issues and their impact on the Internet of Things National and international policy makers and regulators have already played major roles in the history – and success - of the M2M sector. The inspirational role that the EU’s eCall directive played in bringing large scale location service deployments to the automotive sector is widely recognised. However, the long story behind the implementation of eCall has involved much uncertainty in the industry and we can see both the positive and the negative sides of policy making and regulatory processes and their impact on technology development and deployment. Policy and regulation can act as a strong driver - but also be a strong inhibitor if the processes involved become drawn out, tedious, and mired in excessive bureaucratic and sometimes political mechanisms.

However, as the Internet of Things (IoT) starts to transform industries and societies, debate on the role of policies become even more relevant. It is not simply about acting on specific sectors – automotive with eCall, energy with smart metering and others – but goes beyond that to look at the interconnection of systems. The IoT creates a ‘system of systems’ that impacts ways of working across all the systems, interconnecting many different types of processes – and that interconnection is based on data. It has been said in the IoT policy debate that ‘data is the infrastructure’*.

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• In this systemic scenario - and assuming that policy is important for the future of the IoT (and there’s not necessarily a consensus here), the question is: what type of policy framework is necessary for the IoT? And an even more radical question is: are current policy making processes equipped to respond to the transformation being brought by the IoT vision? The different speeds of development in technology and policy making processes have been evident in recent years. For one glaring example, just look at how policy making organisations have struggled to keep up with the rapid development of social media. The IoT, being based on similarly fast moving technologies, will widen that difference - unless the current debate on IoT policy also involves how we can change policy making processes at all levels to cope with the speed of the industry’s development.

Despite those fundamental questions, the current debate around IoT policies is taking place along the following lines: • If ‘data is the infrastructure’, then data will influence all kinds of economic, social, and

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civic activity so, therefore, data security in the IoT becomes of critical importance. How do we enable security in the IoT and what policy initiatives are required? Topics for discussion here are security by design and security standards.

As a consequence of the previous point, the debate on data privacy is obviously also very relevant.

Defining policy frameworks to support the adoption and diffusion of Internet of Things strategies in organisations, with particular attention on small and medium enterprises.

Defining policy frameworks to support research, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the IoT. Defining policy frameworks around the IoT in specific sectors - see Industry 4.0 in German, Smart Factory in the EU, Farming 4.0 in Germany and so on.

The development of the IoT should be designed with the objective of ensuring sustainable development, ensure easy accessibility for the disabled and underserved, and encourage wider civic and democratic participation.

Further themes revolve around the relationships between humans and connected spaces. Will we have a right to remain unconnected in tomorrow’s intelligent spaces?

All these themes are currently under debate in what will hopefully evolve into a truly collaborative debate between all the parties: academia, government and business. Beecham Research – also in collaboration with IoT Now – will continue to explore the issues around IoT policies in order to understand their longer term impact on the IoT community and our wider civilisation.

Saverio Romeo, Principal Analyst Beecham Research

www.beechamresearch.com

*Ellen P. Goodman. The Atomic Age of Data: Policies for the Internet of Things. Report of the 29th Annual Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy. The Aspen Institute IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

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IOT MASTERCLASS

Cecilia Lie, MarCom Manager Blue Telecom Consulting

Unlocking the full potential of IoT through quality assurance Achieving the kind of digital transformation required to implement a successful IoT initiative requires changes that must span the closely intertwined areas of strategy, processes and technology, breaking down traditional organisational and technical silos. Companies should closely examine every relevant area of their own business processes and commit to an ongoing plan of continuous improvement if they’re to reap the very real benefits of the IoT vision. This obviously also applies to the networks and connectivity domains that underpin any IoT offering and which must support increasingly complex value and revenue chains.

E2E view of the IoT delivery chain

Quality Assurance in practice

The kind of Quality Assurance (QA) needed to guarantee IoT service delivery can only be performed when there is a true end-to-end view of the whole IoT connectivity chain.

However, any data gathered through QoS (Quality of Service) software, probes or monitoring systems may turn out to be of little value unless it’s gathered and analysed with specific goals in mind. Valuable time and energy is often wasted tracking metrics that have no direct impact on Service Performance and user or Customer Experience. The same principles also apply to how the insights that these tools can give us should be acted upon in practice – especially when the network environment is often in a state of constant change.

Tele2 delivers one of the most comprehensive IoT platforms in the industry, providing global, secure mobile access and services for automating, controlling and optimising the delivery of IoT connectivity services to any vertical business.

BlueTC is one of Tele2’s suppliers and also a partner in its M2M business. The company’s M2M Active Monitoring system is able to track a broad set of 2G, 3G and 4G network performance indicators in real-time and can independently measure the quality of service provided by any operator partner’s network. This is particularly valuable as M2M roaming becomes more important.

In BlueTC’s view, any kind of QA project must have senior executive support, be communicated to and supported across multiple departments, responsibilities and systems, emphasising that this is a continuous mission-critical initiative that translates into practice as a never ending search for efficiencies, optimisations and cost savings. The most common areas for these applications until recently have been within often vertically siloed operations, maintenance and field support activities. Each company, however, will have different needs and should monitor what is specifically necessary and useful for their own particular needs and operational and commercial environment if they’re to achieve a continuous improvement of service delivery, operations or any other processes.

While provider and partner services are vitally important to monitor, internal IoT service delivery models should also be analysed closely. The way a business’s own servers connect to their IoT devices - or any of the many intermediate checkpoints or protocols across the various network domains involved - are places where possible errors in configurations, hardware faults and degradations in performance need to be quickly identified, controlled, repaired and optimised if a seamless, optimal IoT service delivery environment is to be ensured for all the parties involved.

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This Active Monitoring system allows vertical business customers to compare the quality of service available from multiple M2M connectivity networks and service providers before actually signing a commercial agreement. Once the contract is signed, the system then monitors in real-time the quality of the actual service, enforcing compliance with agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and providing hard, independent evidence in subsequent commercial negotiations. Today, Tele2 successfully employs BlueTC’s Active Monitoring system to gather and analyse performance measurements from their own network, allowing them to deliver proof to their M2M customers that agreed network quality parameters are actually being provided - and thus guarantee SLA compliance. This is especially critical in sectors like healthcare, security and asset management or in any mission critical IoT application.

New use cases for BlueTC’s Active Monitoring solution are being added as additional applications for M2M operators and business customers are developed.

Tele2 and Blue Telecom Consulting (BlueTC®) both facilitate the implementation of IoT solutions across multiple vertical sectors and they will continue to explore new ways for business customers to ensure optimal IoT service delivery strategies.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

EXPERT OPINION

The role of wearable technologies in enterprises The recent news that the seven millionth Apple Watch has been sold raises critical questions for the smart watch community - and the wearable consumer device community more generally, writes Saverio Romeo, principal analyst at Beecham Research. Apple has shown once again that taking a multidisciplinary view of consumer products is key to transforming a nice piece of technology into a lifestyle item and that that ethos is at the heart of Apple. It is difficult to move from pure engineering to add sentiment and feelings – technology meets aesthetics - and it’s in that cross-disciplinary mix that lies Apple’s competitive advantage.

That said, strong engineering design principles and profound technology know-how have also moved the world of wearable devices for enterprises into fascinating new territories. Over the last two years, many market sectors and individual organisations have looked at wearable devices - some of them with a mix of curiosity and scepticism and others with clear ideas on how those technologies can serve their strategic and operational objectives.

We at Beecham Research have also put a strong research emphasis on this area, the reason being that wearable devices are a key element in the wider Internet of Things (IoT) vision. If the IoT is aimed at creating intelligent and connected spaces, then it’s through wearable devices that humans will often engage with those spaces.

And, as the transformative power of the IoT vision touches sectors such as logistics and manufacturing, we will see the presence of wearable devices enhance the roles of humans, their productivity, their creativity and the quality of their work.

By combining wearable devices with contextaware software solutions and Augmented Reality, it becomes possible to empower access to knowledge systems in complex contexts, optimise processes and achieve higher levels of remote collaboration. Head-up displays are already used in some manufacturing production systems to ensure the right job procedure; in collaborative product design and prototyping; in the remote assistance of distant specialised workers; and in surgical theatres to enable surgeons to access critical data without being distracted from their main activities. More immersive Virtual Reality (VR) displays too are finding applications in areas such as training and education in medical schools, industrial design schools and simulations for the emergency services.

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

If VR displays appear futuristic in this context, the public safety and security sector has used wearable devices for some time in the shape of wearable cameras and smart glasses.

The medical sector is experiencing a unique evolution. On the clinical device side, the development of medical devices now includes advanced solutions such as ingestibles, implantables, hearables and exoskeletons. On the consumer side, the proliferation of wellness and lifestyle devices – wristbands, smartwatches and smart sports clothing – provides users with a data-centric perception of their wellbeing. The vital data measured by these devices isn’t clinical as such in nature, but is increasingly being used in patient-GP engagements to increase patients’ awareness of their health condition and encourage them to adopt best practice lifestyles.

By combining wearable devices with context-aware software solutions and Augmented Reality, it becomes possible to empower access to knowledge systems in complex contexts

Those are just a few examples of what’s fast becoming a very dynamic space. Wearable technology for enterprises will continue to rapidly evolve, while also touching sectors such as agriculture. Beecham Research will soon be publishing research about the B2B world of wearable technology – business operations, public safety, and medical as shown in the map – and explore how these technologies are now becoming part of many companies’ IoT strategies.

Saverio Romeo runs research in the areas of M2M, Internet of Things, wearable technologies and smart solutions for vertical sectors. During the last six years, Saverio has focused his technology and market research on the evolution of the mobile industry, primarily looking at European mobile network operators. He has done extensive research and published in areas such as mobile healthcare, smart cities, mobile and wireless innovative services, data analytics in the mobile industry, wearable technologies, smart farming and M2M/IoT in technical and market terms.

Saverio Romeo, Principal Analyst Beecham Research

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EXPERT OPINION

Security in Remote Healthcare How to protect the patient’s data and identity in an increasingly digital world Best practice advice from the Personal Connected Healthcare Alliance Remote health monitoring and Electronic Health Record (EHR) technologies are under development world-wide to improve the quality and safety of healthcare coordination and public health - while still ensuring the privacy and security of patient health information. Interoperability and scalability enable cost savings and are thus fundamental to affordable healthcare coordination.

The remote monitoring and EHR ecosystem includes endusers taking measurements using state-of-the-art medical & fitness sensors, gateways to communicate these measurements over a network to health & fitness providers, and finally to health information services to allow access to patient information by a clinician. The Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHA) is the leading organisation convening, constraining and advocating global technology standards to advise developers of end-to-end interoperable solutions for personal connected health. It publishes the Continua Design Guidelines that clearly define interoperable interfaces that enable the secure flow of medical data among sensors, gateways, and end services, removing ambiguity in underlying healthcare standards and ensuring consistent implementation through product certification.

The Continua Design Guidelines implements a Personal Health Devices Interface centered around or defined by the IEEE 11073 Personal Health Device (PHD) family of standards for data format and exchange between the sensor and the gateway. It defines a Services Interface centered around or defined by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) PCD-01 Transaction to move data between a Personal Health Gateway and Health & Fitness Services. A Health Information Service Interface is centered around or defined by the Health Level 7 International (HL7)-based Personal Health Monitoring Report (PHMR) to move information between a Health and Fitness Service and Healthcare Information Service provider (e.g. EHR). End-to-end security and privacy are addressed through a combination of identity management, consent management and enforcement, entity authentication, confidentiality, integrity and authentication, non-repudiation of origin, and auditing.

Personal Health Devices Interface The IEEE 11073 Personal Health Device family of standards was developed by the IEEE to specifically address the interoperability of personally owned medical or health devices (e.g. thermometers and blood pressure monitors) with an emphasis on personal use and a more simple communications model. This family of standards ensures that the user of the data knows exactly what was measured where, when, and how, and that this critical information is not lost as it is transported from the sensor, across the gateway and, ultimately, to the electronic health record system.

Data Authentication, Authorisation, Integrity, Confidentiality, Privacy, Availability, Accessibility and Traceability may be incorporated into the IEEE 11073 device specialisations and would be supported in the Continua Design Guidelines.

Services Interface The Services Interface allows the uploading of the data gathered at the patient point of care to include personal health device observations, the exchange of questionnaires and responses, and the management of consent directives over a wide area network via HTTP and RESTful interfaces.

The design guidelines ensure interoperability by constraining the IHE profile specifications and the HL7 messaging standards, providing implementation guidance and then independent interface certification to ensure adherence to the correct guidelines. For the Services Interface, security is achieved through confidentiality, integrity and service authentication, consent management, consent enforcement, auditing, and entity authentication as outlined below.

Confidentiality, Integrity and Service Authentication employs web services layer security between the gateway and EHR via the Web Services Interoperability Basic Security Profile. This profile provides interoperability guidance for core web service specifications such as SOAP. Consent management is achieved via the HL7 CDA® Release 2 Consent Directive. This directive documents a bilateral agreement between the patient and an individual or organisation, which grants or withholds authorisation to access individually identifiable health information about the patient. HL7 has produced a draft standard for trial use for implementing consent directives using CDA Release 2.

Consent Enforcement is realised by implementing the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Encryption Standard to enable enforcement of patient consent by encrypting the measurement or questionnaire payload in addition to using point-to-point link security. This enables both the sender and the receiver of the payload to control access to the payload based on the consent policy. In the case of the transport protocol using hData over HTTP, consent enforcement is enabled through the use of IHE DEN profile. ▼

The Continua Design Guidelines support the secure transmission of IEEE 11073 standards-based personal health data from a Personal Health Device (e.g. sensor) to the Personal Health Gateway over a variety of networking transports including USB, ZigBee, NFC, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE).

Data confidentiality and integrity across the Personal Health Devices Interface is achieved via the underlying network communication technology associated with each device. For example, a PHD interface employing the ZigBee standard would implement security mechanisms per the ZigBee Healthcare Profile. The Bluetooth LE transport would utilise LE security mechanisms such as Passkey Entry Pairing, association models, key generation, and encryption.

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IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

High Level Architecture

Auditing is accomplished via IHE’s Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA) Integration Profile, creating a secured domain by ensuring that communicating entities are authenticated by local systems (e.g., X.509) before allowing network access.

Entity Authentication constrain the Web Services (WS) Security profile from the WS-Interoperability Basic Security Profile by using only the WSSecurity Header with the SAML 2.0 assertion as security token and allowing the use of any other token for providing the identity information, including OAuth. Assertion is utilised via SAML 2.0 within HTTP/SOAP uploads and OAuth access tokens are used in REST/hData uploads.

Health Information Services Interface The Health Information Services Interface provides for the electronic exchange of health records employing an HL7-based PHMR. Continua worked with HL7 to develop and define the PHMR to aggregate and deliver personal healthcare monitoring information to electronic medical record systems, including the representation of measurements captured by personal health devices. Continua is currently updating the HL7 PHMR specification, turning the Draft Standards for Trial Use (DSTU) into a final normative specification.

Security is achieved through confidentiality, integrity and authentication, entity authentication, identity management, consent management, consent enforcement, non-repudiation of origin, and auditing as outlined below.

Confidentiality, Integrity and Authentication employs transport layer security as specified in IHE’s Cross Enterprise Document Reliable Interchange (XDR) profile for direct communications. For indirect communications via the IHE Cross Enterprise Document Media Interchange (XDM) profile, the exported file is delivered via email using S/MIME to ensure security.

Entity Authentication is achieved via the IHE Cross-Enterprise User Assertion Profile (XUA), to provide a means to communicate claims about the identity of an authenticated principal (e.g., user, application, system) in transactions that cross enterprise boundaries. The IHE CrossEnterprise User Assertion Profile – Attribute Extension (XUA++), extends the XUA profile with options that enable access controls on the service side (consumer of the data).

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Identity Management is realised via IHE’s Patient Identity Feed Transaction to communicate patient identification and demographic data, IHE Patient Identifier Cross-Reference HL7 Version 3 (PIXV3) to provide cross-referencing of patient identifiers from multiple Patient Identifier Domains (systems that share a common identification scheme and issuing authority for patient identifiers), and Patient Demographics Query HL7 Version 3 (PDQV3) to allow for multiple distributed applications to query a patient information server for a list of patients, based on user-defined search criteria, and retrieve a patient’s demographic information directly into the application.

The Health Information Services Interface provides for the electronic exchange of health records employing an HL7-based PHMR

Consent Management is accomplished via the HL7 CDA Release 2 Consent Directive that, as explained earlier, grants or withholds authorisation to access individually identifiable health information about the patient.

Consent Enforcement is achieved via the IHE Document Encryption Profile which provides a means to encrypt health documents independent of particular transport, healthcare application, or document type, thereby supporting end-to-end confidentiality in heterogeneous or unanticipated workflows.

Non-Repudiation of Origin, which is the assurance that someone cannot deny something, such as the receipt of a message or the authenticity of a statement or contract, is realised via the IHE Document Digital Signature profile that specifies the use of digital signatures for documents that are shared between organisations.

Auditing, similar to the Services Interface, is accomplished via IHE’s Audit Trail and Node Authentication Integration Profile.

The PCHA’s Continua Design Guidelines is the only international initiative to establish a secure endto-end ICT framework for personal connected health and care with open standards. It is the implementation specifics defined by these Continua Design Guidelines, and the independent certification of each vendor’s implementation, that helps to ensure secure and authentic interoperability from remote personal healthcare devices/sensors to personal health gateways and on to electronic health records systems.

For further information, white papers are available on the Personal Connected Health Alliance website.

Thom Erickson is member, board of directors, Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHA) and VP, product management, Qualcomm Technologies.

57

ANALYST REPORT

AT&T Healthcare Solutions – an integrated value proposition for smart healthcare spaces The healthcare sector has been an attractive target for the digital technology industry for some time now, writes Saverio Romeo, principal analyst at Beecham Research. Solutions such as electronic patient records and e-prescriptions have been at the core of the initial focus on e-health, soon followed by the age of mobile devices and mobile applications in healthcare environments (m-health). As the Internet of Things (IoT) vision begins to transform economies and societies, the healthcare provisioning sector can also strongly benefit for this shift. With the IoT, we can see historically separate healthcare environments starting to become integrated into much more of a seamless continuum of services and applications.

That continuum of smart spaces – hospitals, pharmacies, surgeries, individuals – is enabled by data gathered and exchanged across multiple different devices and sensors. That data can in turn drive the optimisation of healthcare provision resources and overheads, so improving services and meeting the unrelenting and continually increasing need for sophisticated healthcare solutions.

AT&T has been an important player in the modernisation of the healthcare provision system in the US, not only offering ehealth and m-health solutions and now moving towards smart healthcare systems that exploit the possibilities of the IoT. I recently discussed that strong presence with two leading members of AT&T’s Mobility team; Steve Burger, area VP of Business Development and Connected Health and Mobeen Khan, AVP, IoT strategy and product management.

SR: Can you give our readers an overview of AT&T’s healthcare proposition?

SB: AT&T’s Healthcare Solutions offering has evolved over the years and today it involves all the key elements that enable a smart healthcare provisioning system able to reach from the individual right through to the hospital environment. The proposition - as summarised in the graphic - is structured into three main parts: wearable devices for wellness and fitness; connected clinical devices for patient monitoring and care; and enterprise solutions for the hospital itself.

SR: What type of wearable devices are you offering?

SB: The focus of our wearable devices for wellness and fitness revolves around enabling individuals to increase their awareness of their own well-being. We offer devices such as wristbands and smart watches, supported by the appropriate applications. These types of device are becoming very important because they create new forms of engagement between patients and GPs. For that reason, despite not being clinical devices, they’re becoming an important ‘first mile’ part of the longer and broader healthcare provisioning environment that stretches from individuals to pharmacies and GPs and on to hospitals.

SR: The world of clinical – as opposed to wearable connected devices is not new to AT&T. What’s the future for these types of device?

SB: This is the area of devices designed to support patients with specific clinical conditions and, as you said, AT&T has focussed on these clinical devices for some time and has offered them as part of a more comprehensive healthcare solution that includes connectivity, security, platforms and fully integrated solutions. With that framework in mind, we are now working in multiple directions simultaneously through key partnerships with various bodies. An interesting example here is a proof-of-concept connected wheelchair that AT&T launched at CTIA in collaboration with Permobil with the aim of increasing a wheelchair user’s independence and freedom of movement.

▼

In more general terms, both wearable devices and clinical devices will evolve rapidly and AT&T intends to be at the forefront of the IoT healthcare world through strategic partnerships: partnerships are a fundamental principle in the digital healthcare market.

Source: Beecham Research

IN ASSOCIATION WITH AT&T 58

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

SR: What type of solutions do you offer hospitals and other healthcare organisations?

SB: Our value proposition for hospitals revolves around the four pillars mentioned previously: connectivity, security, platforms, and integrated solutions. Within that, unified communications solutions – such as videoconferencing, mobile device management and remote patient monitoring are three important components.

Those - in combination with clinical devices - will create the aimed-for smart healthcare environment in which the resulting data and data analytics tools also become essential building blocks.

SR: Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is another key application for healthcare provision systems.

What does AT&T offer there and what are the benefits?

SB: Here we aim to use digital technologies and cognitive analytics to extend healthcare systems beyond hospitals and clinics and deliver personalised care to patients in their home or in their workplace. Vital statistics such as blood pressures and weight metrics are collected at home through connected devices such blood pressure cuffs and pulse oximeters. This data is then transmitted through AT&T’s network to a cloud-based platform that includes data analytics tools to analyse the retrieved data and integrate them with the patient’s electronic record. This analysis can be run on a daily basis, enabling doctors to better monitor their patients and decide the right moment for intervention. Our RPM solution enables a better allocation of medical resources while also increasing the patient’s won confidence and self-awareness.

SR: As the Internet of Things vision is taking shape and broadens, how do you think it will impact the healthcare sector?

SB: Our Remote Patient Monitoring end-to-end solution embraces wearable devices, connected devices, cloud-based platforms and connectivity all in a secure manner. And the continuum of this solution is ensured by data coming from different devices. However, AT&T Healthcare Solutions continues to evolve with the proof-of-concept connected wheelchair being a good example. The connected wheelchair, developed and tested by AT&T Foundry, brings together cutting-edge AT&T technologies such as Global SIM, AT&T Contact Centre, M2X and Flow Designer – as well as

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

allowing data about the wheelchair and the patient to be accessed remotely, shared, and analysed. Generally, we believe that we can help organisations use data more meaningfully and also enable further application development through M2X and Flow Designer. Mobeen Khan can tell IoT Now readers more about these AT&T activities.

SR: What are M2X and Flow Designer?

MK: M2X and Flow Designer are two important components of AT&T IoT Services. M2X is a datacentric device management solution composed of five components: device management, time-series data, triggers, dashboards and Restful APIs. The device management component can add devices, collect sensor data and enable alerts. The timeseries data component collects and visualises data acquired via sensors, while triggers allow the user to set up alerts and events-based processes that enable devices to send notification messages.

Dashboards are the solution’s data visualisation tool while, finally, Restful APIs send data back to the devices and can also query the device. Using these five components, M2X provides a comprehensive picture of the device’s footprint, based around the data produced and shared by those devices. Using this data, developers can create applications to run on those devices and Flow Designer is the development environment that enables them to do that.

SR: In which sectors do you see the greatest impact of M2X and Flow Designer?

MK: M2X and Flow Designer are used in key sectors such as asset management, smart cities, the Industrial Internet, the smart home and, obviously, healthcare. M2X enables the creation of control centres for both devices and connected spaces such as in the smart home, in the management of heavy equipment in the construction sector, or in the management and control of assets that are distributed globally.

Historically, AT&T has been an important player in digital healthcare. Today, that experience is being concentrated to create an integrated value proposition composed of wearable devices, clinical devices, connectivity, cloud-based solutions, IoT platforms such as M2X, and application development enabling components such as Flow Designer - all aimed at enabling smart healthcare spaces.

Steve Burger, area VP, Business Development and Connected Health

Mobeen Khan, AVP, IoT strategy and product management, AT&T

Our Remote Patient Monitoring end-toend solution embraces wearable devices, connected devices, cloudbased platforms and connectivity all in a secure manner

59

EVENT PREVIEW

IoT Evolution Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA 25-28 January 2016 Featuring over 100 speakers from the entire M2M and IoT Ecosystem and a series of individual specialist events covering security, the connected home, connected transportation, analytics and wearables.

“This is the 15th IoT Evolution event”, writes Carl Ford, executive director of content, IoT Evolution, “and, I have to say, not only do we live in interesting times, but with Interesting Things as well. The commitment by Amazon and Salesforce to support IoT on their platforms and the addition of beacons and drones to the IoT space puts a broader perspective on the market opportunities.

“While the press converge to find great story lines for their listeners, readers and viewers, IoT Evolution sticks to the goal of exploring opportunities and helping business professionals figure out how to leverage those opportunities to bring out operational efficiencies, new products and services and revenue growth. IoT Evolution is the most comprehensive vision of where IoT can bring the most benefit to all industries.”

IoT Evolution Expo embraces the fact that the growth curve and the hype cycle are fundamentally different and anyone looking to implement IoT solutions must evaluate the resulting benefits to business processes, customer growth and functionality. Attendees also get practical “take back to the office” knowledge on how the IoT will impact and grow their business.

By participating in sessions covering technical and business related issues, as well as case studies showing real life IoT applications, attendees will grasp the full impact of the IoT’s power to improve operational processes, drive business intelligence and generate new product and service revenue.

The IoT Evolution conference program will feature topics that inform and educate the audience of the latest technologies, new vertical markets, network and platform solutions, security issues, developer technologies, new applications and all of the hottest topics in the IoT industry.

IoT Evolution is comprised of the following tracks, conferences and topics: • The Enterprise and IoT Security tracks – Hear from the Machine-to-Machine and IoT ecosystems to help you sort through the myriad of M2M solutions, platforms and applications. Hear about enterprise solutions in supply chain, asset management and remote monitoring. Get insight into current state of IoT concerns and solutions including device and physical layer security, as well as app and network security.

• The Connected Home and Building Conference – Hear how controlling nearly all aspects of buildings and homes will provide meaningful functionality for consumers while also providing businesses with remote diagnostics, maintenance and analytics capabilities that will save money and drive new products.

• The Connected Transportation Conference - The IoT Evolution Connected Transportation event focuses on the improvements in today’s vehicle and fleet management services and provides perspective on market forces, revenue opportunities and technical issues. A significant portion of the content in this event will cover drones and applications in film making, agriculture, construction, oil and gas and more.

• FOG, Analytics and Data Conference- Explore how to drive business intelligence to the edge of the network and use it to develop real time business analytics to create new business opportunities while improving business processes. Hear about stream databases, analytics, edge routing and more.

• Service providers, platform companies and device manufacturers, including Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and Vodafone, all ready to deliver guidance on implementation strategies as well as network, software and hardware options and solutions

• ALL NEW Wearable Tech Expo – See wearable tech’s influence across all sectors including consumer, fashion, fitness, medical and sports. Understand how the wearables market will combine with augmented reality and connectivity technologies to transform the way people live, work and play.

• Successful IoT pioneers and business entrepreneurs who have leveraged M2M solutions to drive game changing vertical and horizontal applications

• PLUS – an IOT Certification Program, Battle of the IoT Platforms, Networking events and more. ▼

IoT Evolution will feature over 100 speakers from the entire M2M and IoT Ecosystem: • The industry’s most renowned analysts, thought leaders and researchers including, James Brehm and Associates, ABI, 451 Research, Machina Research, ILS Technology and others

• IoT Evolution Developers Conference - Get hands-on practical training on the various aspects of implementing the IoT, from concept though deployments. Get design and development training on the entire M2M and IoT spectrum, from wearables and home devices to industrial applications.

Classes cover cloud computing, automotive technologies, and security, while looking at ways to enhance customer engagement, and elevate end user experience.

www.iotevolutionexpo.com 60

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

EVENT PREVIEW

IoT Evolution Expo Special Events Telit DevCon IoT Innovation 2016 Learn how industry leaders are using the IoT to create new markets, transform their business and achieve measurable ROI. Connect with IoT innovators and get to market faster by leveraging the expertise of Telitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vast M2M, Mobile and IoT ecosystem.

Battle of the Platforms Network platforms offer quicker development and deployment times, scalability, low risk and other benefits. Get an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate all the market has to offer.

Meet with market leaders and find out how they differentiate themselves from each other.

See the full range of solutions for your unique requirements

Use Code NOW and

Save 20% for IoT Evolution

IoT Certification Series The IoT Certification Series is designed to provide a high-level overview of the technologies contending in the IoT+M2M space, and their applicability to consumer and business/industrial markets.

Technologies discussed will span IoT devices and sensors, IoT sensor networks and gateways, and both small and large-scale M2M networking capabilities.

IoT Evolution Theatre The IoT Evolution Theatre provides access to IoT interactive content sessions, demonstrations, case studies and more. Get access to special programming on IoT in a small, interactive setting including; IoT Evolution Expo is also supported by Diamond Sponsors Multicopter Warehouse and Telit; Platinum Sponsor Eurotech; Gold Sponsors KORE, Ingenu and Sprint; Corporate sponsors Simcom.

Carl Ford, IoT Evolution

Mobile World Congress 2016: 30 years of Innovation in Mobile The GSMAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s annual mobile industry event, Mobile World Congress will open its doors at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona between 22-25 February 2016. The event, which will also celebrate its 30th anniversary, has the theme â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Mobile is Everythingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, and will welcome more than 95,000 visitors from across the world. In addition to the traditional keynotes, the conference will include in-depth sessions on big data, connecting the unconnected, devices, digital commerce, emerging markets, enterprise mobility, financial services, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile identity and privacy, network evolution and security, among others. There will also be a range of seminars providing insights on key GSMA and industry initiatives including Connected Living, Connected Women, Digital Commerce, Digital Inclusion, Disaster Response, Mobile Money, mYouth, Network 2020, Personal Data/Mobile Connect and Spectrum.

The GSMA Innovation City will again be a highlight of the Mobile World Congress, with confirmed partners including AT&T, Jasper, KT Corporation and Sierra Wireless. Covering nearly 1,900 square metres, this unique space will enable attendees to experience technology in context and see how mobile-connected products and services can improve the lives of citizens and businesses. Mobile World Congress will also feature leading products, services and technologies from

over 2,000 companies, from handsets and devices to network infrastructure, software and services. The show floor will include a number of exhibits focusing on specific technology areas, including the Graphene Pavilion, Green Pavilion, IoT Pavilion, Mobile Money Pavilion and Wearables Pavilion. It will also include App Planet that connects the developer community and the broader mobile ecosystem as well as Four Years From Now (4YFN) which brings leading mobile startups together with entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators, incubators and large corporations.

Mobile World Congress 2016 will include the GSMA Ministerial Programme that convenes governments, regulators and industry leaders to debate the critical issues shaping mobile around the world. In addition to the exclusive Mobile World Summit, the Ministerial Programme will include focused leadership sessions addressing key topics such as digital inclusion, mobile identity, the IoT and future regulatory paradigms, as well as regional sessions. The 2016 Ministerial Programme, which is sponsored by Intel, will host more than 1,500 attendees over the four days.

For more information on the 2016 Mobile World Congress including how to attend, exhibit or sponsor, visit www.mobileworldcongress.com.

EVENTS

Internet of Things Awards Wembley Stadium, London 1 December 2015 www.terrapinn.com/iotas

IoT Evolution

Embedded World 2016

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA 25-24 January 2016 www.iotevolutionexpo.com/east/

Nuremburg 23-25 February 2016 www.embeddedworld.de/en/exhibition-info/

Smart Energy UK & Europe 2016 Lancaster Hotel, London 28-29 January 2016 www.smuksummit.com

Industry of Things World USA 2016 Hard Rock Hotel San Diego, USA 25-26 February 2016 www.industryofthingsworldusa.com

IoT For Utilities Houston, USA 2-3 December 2015 www.energyconferencenetwork.com/i ot-for-utilities/

The Internet of Things World Forum 2015 Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai 6-8 December 2015-11-23 www.iotwf.com/

Connected Cars USA Washington, USA 4 February 2016 www.eu-ems.com

Internet of Retail Crowne Plaza Gerrards Cross, London 9-10 February 2016 www.theinternetofbusiness.co.uk

Internet of Things World 2016 San Francisco 10-12 May 2016 www.iotworldevent.com/

Smart Cities India 2016 Exhibition and Conference New Delhi, India 11-13 May, 2016 www.smartcitiesindia.com/default.aspx

IoT Tech Expo Europe IoT Slam 2015 Virtual Internet of Things Virtual Event, in the Cloud 9th December 2015 Conference and Exhibition www.iotslam.com

Wearable Device & Technology Expo

Olympia, London 10-11 February 2016 www.gateway.iottechexpo.com/europe

Big Data & IoT in Oil & Gas Canada Calgary, Alberta, Canada 16-17 February 2016 www.energyconferencenetwork.com /iotcan/

Security of Things World 2016 Berlin 27-28 June 2016 www.securityofthingsworld.com

Tokyo, Japan 13-15 January 2016 www.wearable-expo.jp/en/

Mobile World Congress Barcelona 22-25 February 2016 www.mobileworldcongress.com

64

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Know your stuff.

Knowledge, as you know, is power. As a single-source provider, Numerex empowers enterprise operations with world-class, managed IoT solutions that are simple, innovative, scalable, and secure. We simplify the complexity of machine interconnectivity—enabling the Internet of Things—so you can solve business challenges, produce new revenue Z[YLHTZ JYLH[L VWLYH[PUN LMÄ JPLUJPLZ HUK PTWYV]L `V\Y IV[[VT SPUL ;V Ä UK V\[ TVYL JHSS LTHPS PUMV'U\TLYL_ JVT VY ]PZP[ U\TLYL_ JVT

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DECEMBER/JANUARY 2015/16 • VOLUME 5 • ISSUE 5

LPWA SUPPLEMENT MultiTech’s David Smith on broadening the spectrum of choice with LPWA

STREAM TECHNOLOGIES Evolving IoT-X for LPWA

PLUS: Contributions and insight into LPWA futures from Sierra Wireless, Gemalto and Link Labs

Leveraging next-generation and virtual networks EXPECTATIONS ON CSP SPENDING ON SOFTWARE, HARDWARE, AND SERVICES FOR CLOUD COMPUTING, NFV AND SDN

3000 Revenue (USD million)

“

Delivering services in a more mobile, social and connected world requires networks that are more flexible, reliable, affordable and intelligent than is possible using traditional approaches.

”

• A radical shift in networking approaches and architecture is

2500 2000 1500 1000

needed to support the changing business needs of 5000

communications service providers (CSPs).

0

• Analysys Mason’s research indicates that CSPs and vendors are at the very start of a decade-long market journey to

2013

2018

2023

CAGR

Cloud computing

3910

7635

12051

12%

NFV

181

2433

29149

66%

SDN

319

3001

20112

51%

rebuild networks and leverage them to support more individualised, on-demand, communications-based digital economy services.

SOFTWARE-CONTROLLED NETWORKING SPENDING BY MARKET SEGMENT, WORLDWIDE, 2013, 2018 AND 2023 [SOURCE: ANALYSYS MASON, 2015]

DRIVERS FOR SPENDING

Enterprise IT and data centre virtualisation: cloud computing

Increasing commercial deployments of NFV policy control, ISP and IMS core

NFV product development of policy control, ISP, IMS, EPC and eNodeB

2013

2014

More trials of NFV: policy control, ISP and IMS core

2015

2016

Increasing commercial NFV and CSP SDN deployments in mobile: EPC, Gi interface, eNodeB and IP RAN

2017

Cloud computing and NFV become more mainstream CSP SDN gains maturity Demand grows for NG-OSSs spanning physical/virtual and IT/telecoms

2019

2020 Increased transformation to next-generation virtualised networks (cloud, NFV and CSP SDN) begins

Increase in the number of CSP SDN trials in mobile and transport networks

Decreasing rate of spending in cloud computing (data centre) Increasing rate of spending in NFV Increasing rate of spending in CSP SDN SOFTWARE-CONTROLLED NETWORK SPENDING TIMELINE [SOURCE: ANALYSYS MASON, 2015]

Analysys Mason’s deep understanding of telecom software puts it at the forefront of network virtualisation http://www.analysysmason.com/Trending-Topics/Next-generation-virtual-networks/

GLOBAL TELECOMS SPECIALIST ADVISERS ON TELECOMS, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

analysysmason.com

CONTENTS

LOW POWER WIDE AREA NETWORKING Given the huge wave of interest in the potential of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking as a major potential game changer for the future of the IoT, we decided to dedicate a special supplement to the topic.

With a wide range of current and emerging technologies to choose from, it’s certain that LPWA will remain firmly in the headlines for the next few years as cellular operators and a host of new entrants compete to win the battle of who can connect the most things.

7

8

David Smith, senior VP, engineering and innovation, at IoT innovator MultiTech Systems, explains what technologies are available under the LPWA banner and their different roles

Nigel Chadwick, CEO of Stream Technologies, positions Stream’s IoT-X connectivity, enablement and billing platform in the world of LPWA

12

16

Olivier Beaujard, VP market development at Sierra Wireless, explores the paths ahead in LPWA options and positions LTEM as the optimum solution

IoT Now’s Alun Lewis explores current market perceptions about the LPWA landscape and the different claims being made by the competing camps

20

22

Loic Bonvarlet, product marketing director for M2M Solutions and Services at Gemalto, examines the security issues involved in moving towards a LPWA environment

Brian Ray, CEO of LPWA pioneer Link Labs, gives us an update on their progress so far and where LoRa fits into the connected future

LPWA SUPPLEMENT - December / January 2015/16

3

INTERVIEW

LPWA – broadening the spectrum of choice The technology behind the IoT, despite the inevitable hype, still needs a lot of development work done before our experience becomes truly immersive and ubiquitous. The hype, however, is largely being generated by the ‘look at all the wonderful things we can do with our clever sensors’ camp who seem to be ignoring the fact that the data generated by the expected trillions of IoT devices has to be carried from the sensors to the gateways and beyond. Indeed, the diversity of technical requirements for the multitude of verticals that could potentially be served is driving some of the fastest early movers to develop dedicated IoT radio networks independent of public networks, using Low Power Wide Area network (LPWA) technologies such as LoRaWAN.

IoT Now: David, can you position MultiTech’s involvement in the IoT for us?

DS: Our portfolio reflects our belief that there’s no single technology or protocol that covers all of the IoT. Going forward, if one requires different technologies which all have different degrees of applicability, then they are going to need to coexist. You can’t have a US$5 sensor that is also able to stream videos. At least not today - though perhaps in a few years’ time.

MultiTech as a company started out in the M2M world more than 40 years ago and our portfolio reflects our history of innovation in the space even including analog modems which for some applications still work fine. In the U.S. however,

analog devices are going to have decreasing viability over the next few years. Our company has moved more into wireless technologies, particularly, cellular, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The ubiquity of these kinds of networks was one of the driving factors behind M2M’s growth and we have a portfolio that reflects that. Thus, we have a cellular portfolio that contains unique offerings with our cellular modules which are either embedded or act as out-of-the box products, and all of which are fully certified as end devices, just like a cell phone. This means that the person using them doesn’t have to do anything more from a regulatory standpoint to use or deploy them. Our cellular products cover the world and all technologies such as 2G, 3G, and LTE and, if someone comes up with some certification we don’t have, we’ll do it for them. We also have WiFi and Bluetooth portfolios, as well as products offering GNSS, and of course, LPWA radio connectivity.

IoT Now: What plans do you have for tracking the new flavours of LTE that are in the pipeline?

DS: In the beginning of 2016 we’ll be coming out with our LTE Cat-1 devices and eventually with Cat-M devices. Interestingly, I think there’s a good possibility that the module suppliers and carriers

▼

The problem is that you can’t just hook IoT sensors up to the nearest Wi-Fi-enabled lamp post or 4G base station without some kind of secure interface tailored specifically to the main bearer network and, even then, the bearer network may not be up to the data loading that some IoT sensor arrays require. To find out more about this crucial area of the next big thing, IoT Now’s Pete Dykes spoke to David Smith, senior VP, engineering and innovation at IoT innovator MultiTech Systems.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH MULTITECH SYSTEMS 4

LPWA SUPPLEMENT - December / January 2015/16

David Smith, senior VP, engineering and innovation, MultiTech Systems

may just skip over Cat-0 and go straight to Cat-M - or one of the other competing standards being proposed. However, today the accepted plan is that we’ll introduce Cat-1 devices, then Cat-M and finally NB-LTE as they are released over the coming few years. In the IoT world, Cat-1 is a big step toward lower cost and lower complexity, with modules having significantly less complexity than their Cat-4 brothers. But the relatively modest gains in IoT applicability between Cat-0 and NB-LTE are such that Cat-0 may not be worth the effort to fully productise by module makers or deploy by carriers. This is because the ultimate goal will be performance on the order of NB-LTE and the effort required by the module industry to produce each module or for the carriers to deploy networks for these iterations is significant.

But we aren’t just about cellular. We will continue to follow Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies and offer products incorporating developments in those standards. And, of course, we are moving strongly into other emerging IoT technologies, such as the LoRa LPWA offering. We have been working with the LoRa technology for the last 18 months and have developed a product line to bring us into the world of IoT sensors and data gathering using low-power, low-energy, inexpensive and ubiquitous radios. We’re using LoRa radios from Semtech because they have much better operational characteristics for the IoT applications that most people want to use them for. As we go forward, we’ll always respond to our customers’ needs by providing the wireless capabilities that the IoT market requires.

Along those lines, we are even looking at WAVE technology as represented by V2X (Vehicle-toVehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure), which is based on the 802.11p protocol. When that kicks off, you might see our products being put into vehicles, but you will definitely see our stuff on the infrastructure side.

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IoT Now: What do you think are the particular advantages of deploying MultiTech solutions?

What makes you stand out from the rest?

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INTERVIEW

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You can take pretty much any of our products and they already have all the certifications you’ll need

DS: I think one of the main ones is that you can take pretty much any of our products and they already have all the certifications you’ll need to bring your product to the market or deploy into the field, saving a great deal of development time, effort and cost.. That is something that is definitely unique and sets our products apart in the cellular and LPWAN world.

customers. Moreover, by getting closer to our customers, we believe, we can better respond to their specific needs and address their pain points in a more agile way.

We also believe that if you’re going to use our products, you need to be able to do what you want with them. You need to be able to deploy into the places and environments that you want to deploy into and you need to have our product work with the equipment that you need it to work with. Take our cellular or LPWA gateways for example: they are used in a very broad set of markets for pretty much anything, so we try to make the deployment process as easy and as simple as possible; thus we have industrial versions that will exist indoors in an equipment closet or on the factory floor, as well as selfpowered IP67 versions for the outdoors or on a cell tower.

DS: We will be moving strongly in several business directions simultaneously. One is, of course, tracking changes in the cellular world where we already have a strong presence and we’ll continue to be a big player in that. So, as LTE evolves, you’ll see us evolve right along with it and offer not only similar types of products to those we have now, but others that incorporate technologies that provide unique solutions for particular situations or environments. We will also continue to support other wireless standards such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. In the IoT world, we will be deepening and broadening what we’re currently doing with LPWA. We believe that IoT will require many different technologies depending on the application and we will plan to provide those technologies, and combinations of technologies, to enable solutions that don’t exist right now. So, during that period we’ll be launching gateways supporting multiple technologies simultaneously as well as end device modules with multiple capabilities.

IoT Now: What is your business model?

DS: In response to the consultative nature of IoT engagements, we are actively moving from a distributor-centric model to more of a hybrid sales strategy – retaining our outstanding roster of distributors around the globe, while simultaneously developing a strategic and regional sales and support organisation to better assist our customers. This is just another example of our commitment to making the adoption of our technology as easy as possible for our

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IoT Now: And what about security in IoT? What are the issues there?

DS: Security is one of those areas that we invest heavily in now and that we’ll be working on through 2020 and beyond.

Our security approach incorporates a threepronged strategy. Firstly we will provide a Trusted Identity capability so that it is possible for the network to be confident that that device is what it says it is. Secondly, we will provide secure execution and encrypted storage within the computing elements of this device so that it cannot have its code examined or changed. Third is physical tamper detection, which will stop the device from working if it is physically interfered with in any way. In addition, we are partnering with leaders in the data security space as well as

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We also want customers to feel that when they use our equipment, they’re not bound to one particular technology or one particular carrier.

We have competitors who, for instance, only sell AT&T equipment, which is fine and we don’t have a problem with that, but we also have many customers who are deploying devices literally all over the world and right across the U.S. where they need to have, depending on the signal quality, devices which are compatible with Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile or some other MVNO - it just depends on where they are being deployed. We support all of those and more.

IoT Now: What milestones do you expect to reach in the next 12 months and going forward to 2020?

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across the M2M and IoT value chain to continually improve confidence in the security of MultiTech enabled solutions.

This approach goes both above and below the lower level protocols, so we end up with a solid stack of nested security features. What this means is that when our device talks to the network, the network can trust it is talking to a genuine device and the device can trust the network.

IoT Now: How do you see the market developing now and in the future in terms of the players and their products?

DS: I think the IoT market will follow the same pattern as most other emerging technology markets. I believe there is something of a respiratory cycle about it. The inhale has all these little companies starting up, doing their own thing and pushing the envelope in their respective areas, and then the exhale comes with a period of consolidation, which may followed by another wave of growth and another period of consolidation. I think IoT is going to follow a similar cycle but, in the case of the IoT and the rapid growth that’s expected, it could be more like panting than regular breathing!

IoT is very fragmented at present with many smaller players, but you do have some of the big players such as IBM, Cisco, GE and ARM in there as well. What’s missing at the moment is that people focus on the endpoint side of the IoT, but forget that a network is needed to connect to.

Many of the existing cellular carriers as well as younger start-ups are looking at deploying LPWA networks. From our discussions with the large carriers, it seems they’re not looking at the technology itself with suspicion, but they are scratching their heads and thinking ‘how can we make money at this?’. A fair amount of work needs to be done to develop profitable business models that a large global or nationwide network provider can adopt to drive the deployment of public networks. In the interim, you should expect to see municipalities and other government entities working with companies to deploy smaller public networks and many privately operated networks springing up as well. We believe LoRaWAN lends itself particularly well to

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the development of private networks in certain vertical markets where both security and control of the network is important – for example in oil and gas.

However, I think that once LPWA networks start getting deployed by companies such as Actility, Orbiwise and Proximus, who are now deploying municipal and larger-sized networks, the big carriers will then watch to see if those networks are profitable or not and, if they are, perhaps we will see some consolidation in the marketplace.

That way, the larger carriers don’t have to work the business model out for themselves.

Another thing that could change over time is the frequency spectrum used by IoT networks. Right now, a majority of LPWA IoT networks are based on regional ISM unlicensed spectrum, but it should be obvious that Europe, which doesn’t have too much unlicensed bandwidth available, has the potential to quickly run out, and so eventually may the U.S. - plus the rest of the world. As part of our technology roadmap, we expect that by the end of 2017, use of licensed bands for IoT networks will be becoming more commonplace - if not dominant - as growth is expected to be really rapid and, while it might then drop off a little, such growth will quickly outstrip the unlicensed bands’ ability to support the huge and growing number of deployed devices.

IoT Now: So where does MultiTech stand today in relation to all this?

DS: I think that today, MultiTech is very well positioned in the IoT world as we have the right products and the right vision to not only supply and follow the market, but to be right there at the front and help to guide it. I know others in this space may say similar things, but I happen to think it’s true for us, especially from the IoT security standpoint. In early 2016, capabilities in our products will emerge which will allow very fast deployment of secure networks and devices, so that by the end of 2016, news of new, secure, capable IoT networks or new smart cities being rolled out should almost be a daily occurrence which is faster than many analysts have predicted, and MultiTech we will be right there driving that growth.

“” Once LPWA networks are deployed, the big carriers will then watch to see if those networks are profitable or not

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INTERVIEW

Stream’s COO - Kevin McDowall and CEO – Nigel Chadwick, looking forward to 2016

Stream Technologies evolves IoT-X for LPWA subscription management It seems a widely-held opinion that Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks - and in particular LoRa – look set to take the IoT world by storm. This could be just as well, given the predicted huge number of IoT sensors and devices that will be connected over the next few years and the resulting ‘data tsunami’.

The value generated across the IoT sector is likely to be enormous for those positioned with the right solutions and services in place, but with LoRa happening so quickly, the most agile players are likely to reap substantial rewards. developing the platform for wider application, Stream claims that it has also addressed a number of other IoT related issues around Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Finally, Stream says that its platform enables cellular operators in M2M/IoT to quickly extend their wireless services to include LPWA. As for other innovative entrants into the market looking to exploit LPWA, Stream is now inviting these players to test-run their solutions and services at the company’s new LPWAN incubator and demonstrator facility in Scotland. Intrigued, IoT Now spoke to Nigel Chadwick, its founder and CEO. ▼

Stream Technologies believes that it is one of these agile players. Its IoT-X connectivity enablement and billing platform, is already attracting substantial interest around the world.

Initially developed for Stream’s own internal management of SIM lifecycles, it was then later made available to MNOs, with Caribbean operator Digicel being the first user. Stream says that IoT-X is fast becoming established as a leading LPWA subscription management platform, particularly given that IoT-X’s functionality has now been extended to include a LoRa WAN Network Server. In the process of

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NC: Stream was founded in 2000, so our team has been involved in M2M and IoT provisioning and connectivity management for many years – over which we have built a team with a real depth of expertise and experience in providing multiconnectivity services for IoT. We evolved from an MVNO based background specialising in M2M. That started in cellular, expanded out into satellite connectivity and latterly LPWA networks, including LoRa as the latest addition to the management functionality of its IoT-X platform. Stream evolved from operating in its earlier days as a successful MVNO connectivity provider to enterprise clients across most verticals in M2M and IoT, so it has gained a substantial and unique understanding of what is required to efficiently manage and deliver wireless connectivity to IoT clients.

Since 2005, we focused on developing our IoT-X platform to manage, monitor and monetise all the device connections relating to our own B2B customers. It was created to take the friction out of integrating with multiple network operators and at the same time building-in functionality to enable easy control of scalable volumes of connections across a large and diverse enterprise client base. We realised around a year and a half ago that our IoT-X platform and effectively, a replicated or ‘cloned’ concept of Stream in terms of providing all the support, expertise and related technical infrastructure within the IoT-X ‘wrap’, was an alternative solution to the connectivity platforms offered by the likes of Jasper or Ericsson. There exist a significant number of operators around the world who possess neither the requisite experience, expertise, or fully formed teams needed to efficiently and effectively manage M2M/IoT connectivity across their network footprint. In late 2014 we released our platform - that had evolved consistently over a 10-year period - for adoption by external parties and since then we have been on-boarding a growing number of Proof of Concepts and signing off Platform as a Service agreements.

Concurrently, we have also been busy forging partnerships with value added service providers, to provide end customers with a choice of connectivity/data/device management options.

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In January 2015, at CES, we realised that LoRa based technology was fast evolving and that it had the potential to really set the LPWAN sector alight. What we didn’t quite realise at that time however was the speed at which it would begin to spread around the globe. Stream remains agnostic towards connectivity types integrated into IoT-X, so developing the platform to include LoRa subscription and billing management functionality was a natural next step in its evolution. This was completed by the end of Q2 and in November our development team released a LoRa WAN Network Server element within the platform. We believe that it’s the only platform in the world that can simultaneously manage connectivity across 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE cellular, satellite and LPWA networks - including LoRa. Furthermore, it’s one of a very few platforms that manages subscription and billing on LoRa networks. This means flexibility in monetisation models, aggregation of multiple (discretely owned and operated) LoRa networks – effectively roaming management, simple device management, as well as enabling gateway and base station meta data and management.

Since 2005, we focused on developing our IoT-X platform to manage, monitor and monetise all the device connections relating to our own B2B customers

So, IoT-X holds strong appeal to existing private LoRa network providers seeking to create a return on their investment through opening up their network to others, as well as enabling new entrants seeking to deploy and operate LoRa networks. In reality, IoT-X has the capability to enable the creation of entirely new types of network operators. We call them SVNO’s {Super Virtual Network Operators}, whereby IoT-X is primarily or initially deployed to manage a specific type of wireless connectivity for a particular solution use case. However, we can also effectively make available alternative carrier options to the ‘adopter’ of IoT-X by virtue of the fact that other carriers/network types are already integrated and ready to ‘switch on’. For example, we could enable a car manufacturer to manage its connected car programme across cellular, satellite and LPWA from a single platform and across different geographies if so required.

LoRa and other LPWA technologies have the potential to change the IoT game in many ways – ostensibly it could displace some of the lower data solutions away from cellular mobile network operators. ▼

IoT Now: How did Stream technologies become involved in LPWA technologies like LoRa?

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NC: We consider Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been one of the main, if not THE main barrier to exponential growth of connections in IoT. The major growth to date in IoT has been on cellular networks. The pricing models, whilst differentiated for IoT (from retail tariffs, for example), have nevertheless had to take account of infrastructure and licensing deployment models as well as work within investment return constraints and demands. The emerging LPWA networks to a large degree are free from these characteristics and this can help drive down TCO - not to forget that end point/sensor module pricing and operating longevity are additional factors also radically reducing TCO. Stream is already seeing at this relatively early stage of LoRa network deployment new and innovative commercialisation models, as well as the entry of completely new players into the IoT global market that appear to really open up the prospect of accelerating growth towards tens of billions of connected end points over the next few years. Clusters of privately owned networks can be ‘aggregated’ and subscriptions managed across disparate networks using IoT-X. This is a game changer. These are the factors now combining to make the 80% of IoT connections forecast to be connected on non-cellular network infrastructures a reality.

IoT Now: Is Stream bringing down the TCO for networks?

NC: Given our investment over a ten year period into IoT-X we are able to offer AWS (Amazon Web Services) style pricing thereby radically reducing TCO. Stream’s combined infrastructure and technology, which we replicate for other networks as part of the IoT-X concept, vastly reduces the TCO of managing large volumes of connected devices. Because of the way the IoT-X infrastructure is designed, the technology is highly adaptive and flexible in terms of charging and billing models that can be applied to network usage. Revenue share, data bundles per sensor, per time period or on a pooled basis, as well as per message, and multiple others too are all possible. Furthermore it is also possible to bundle in and price other services such as data exchange services similar to those provided by wot.io in New York, or any other company in the ecosystem that provide value adds such as device management and enterprise apps. You can bundle all these together and really drive down the TCO, so that it makes IoT a feasible play, resolves scalability issues and offers a rapid ramp-up of volume.

IoT Now: How do you cope with the widely differing connectivity requirements that the potentially massive variety of IoT sensors and backhaul infrastructure demand?

NC: This is a real challenge in the fast evolving connectivity environment of today and a challenge that has been at the forefront of our vision throughout evolving IoT-X, realising that diversity is inherent within the communications industry and is likely to stay. Cellular operators have to deal with the differing characteristics and relative attributes of everything from GPRS through to 4G/LTE, and then there are the satellite

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operators with highly variable data capacity throughputs. In this context, LPWA is just another variant. Stream has always embraced and dealt with diversity in terms of designing and building a connectivity management platform to achieve a ‘single pane view and control’ solution, recognising that some primary connectivity types are more suited to certain IoT deployments than others. Then there are also secondary connectivity variants and different forms of backhaul as well.

Not everywhere has wired backhaul capability - or even cellular for that matter such as at sea for example – or consider critical situation solutions that absolutely need to get data from A to B such as in emergency situations. There are plenty of such scenarios where LPWA networks might be deployed from which the data is then backhauled over satellite. At the LoRa Alliance meeting recently held in Rotterdam, Stream demonstrated managing routing and transiting data from sensors on a localised LoRa based network, backhauled over the Iridium satellite network.

IoT Now: How can cellular operators use Stream’s platform to get into LPWA and specifically LoRa? NC: It’s pretty obvious that the vast majority of MNO’s use subscriber management and billing platforms that have been developed for consumer and corporate voice and mobile services. But they don’t have such systems/platforms for managing IoT. LPWA network deployment introduces a specific requirement for networks to be able to efficiently and effectively manage both vast numbers of tiny data transactions and billing models that are built around M2M. Many cellular operators therefore don’t have the ability to manage M2M connectivity to any degree of granularity.

Stream’s IoT-X platform can enable management of these aspects easily through lightweight integration using APIs, because subscriber management is already integrated into the platform, which works with any wireless protocol. So, MNO’s can take the platform and manage M2M connectivity in their cellular realm and extend it out to all the other integrations already on IoT-X, such as Iridium or Avanti for satellite; or any of the LPWA solutions; or they could say they’re not interested in managing M2M connectivity on cellular because they may already have an M2M connectivity management platform and opt to just use the LoRa functionality on its own.

It really is that simple. As mentioned earlier, Stream’s approach has always been a technology-agnostic one and it’s served us well. We effectively ‘future proof’ both network operators and enterprise clients and this is becoming increasingly important as global clients scale worldwide.

IoT Now: So does this represent an evolution of Stream Technologies?

NC: Stream has for many years continued to innovate and as a result now deploys a technology set that not only addresses many of the challenges inherent to managing IoT connectivity, but in totality represents a unique design, with an engineering and operational approach to enable network operators of all types to deploy efficient, robust and reliable connectivity ▼

IoT Now: What is one of the main barriers to deployment of the predicted billions of end points in IoT?

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services for IoT. To achieve this we have continued to grow our technical development and support teams over a ten year period, resulting now in a team that is one of the most experienced and capable around. Our coding is all done in-house, meaning we continuously enhance the software upon which IoT-X is based, plus we can customise network operator or enterprise client requirements very quickly. The outcome of this evolution is that Stream has effectively transitioned into a fully-fledged software house focused on fast tracking enhancing the functionality and capability of the IoT-X connectivity management platform and related APNs/backhaul infrastructure. The private ownership structure and our company DNA references ‘strategic patience’, whereby sticking to a pursuit of a vision over an extended timeframe has provided us with the technical know-how and experience to innovate, design, engineer and implement in a uniquely agile manner.

IoT Now: The fact is however that there are other LPWA technologies in the market - is there a case for co-existence?

NC: There are quite a number of LPWA network variants out there. IoT-X is already integrated with a fair number of these and is ready to be adopted and deployed – today. The agnostic orientation of our platform, our use of a single APN, the design of our backhaul infrastructure, are all primed for and ready for managing subscriptions and billing across different LPWA technologies.

IoT Now: Do the different ISM regulations around the world create any problems for LoRa? NC: The main challenge derives from the different radio bands that are used in the U.S. and the European Union, meaning companies having to ship completely different hardware most of the time. It’s not so much a logistical problem as more about planning where the devices are going to be deployed. Companies in the supply chain of equipment and solutions have to really think hard about what they are going to do with a particular device. The cost of components and the ease with which the device will interface with LoRa aren’t affected most of the time; it’s just that you have to buy a different radio chip. It rather destroys the idea of one size fits all!

IoT Now: What role can LoRa play in smart cities?

NC: In the context of smart cities, LoRa’s role is about enabling transit of data so that the data can then be made sense of, ultimately enabling decision making. We have seen data-driven

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decision making automated for many years in M2M and the smart city concept is the latest evolution of this – but involving much larger data sets from a wider variety of sensors, which usually also means more complex data sets.

Stream is in the process of deploying at its Glasgow R&D centre one of the first UK city-wide LoRa Networks as part of our LPWA incubator and demonstrator facility. As such, we are encouraging companies and other organisations, including universities, to participate in our incubator facility, to demonstrate and test, or even develop, a range of solutions and technologies relating to LPWA, including LoRa. Smart cities will be just one of several ‘themes’ encouraged by our team at the facility. One particular advantage of using LoRa in this type of urban-city situation is the substantial cost reduction it can offer over other networking technologies. Other advantages vested in LoRa include its ability to penetrate buildings better than 4G, its relatively easy and low deployment cost, and low power requirements. It opens the prospect of longevity long term deployments in volume.

The main challenge derives from the different radio bands that are used in the U.S. and the European Union, meaning companies having to ship completely different hardware most of the time

Stream, together with the Glasgow Caledonian University, is also working on other technologies under the auspices of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership which involve harvesting the energy emanating from wireless transmitters in the Glasgow City area. We have mapped the wireless energy topographies and our research is exploring the prospect of harvesting that energy to power sensors, which then allows assessment of reducing battery dependency, or perhaps extending the overall life of some sensors.

Potentially this could enable significant reductions in battery size – perhaps by as much as 75% - using energy harvesting for top up.

We’re exploring the concept of harvesting energy from broadcast sources such as television and radio transmissions and the irony hasn’t escaped us that we’re looking to use energy from one radio source to power another. How cool is that?

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INTERVIEW

LTE-M – clarity on the path ahead Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing – until you have to make a critical decision that’s going to affect your life – or your business – for years to come. Until recently, the range of wide area connectivity technologies for M2M and IoT applications was largely limited to cellular, satellite and WiFi. The last few years however have seen a small explosion take place in terms of new Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) wireless options, specifically tailored for the IoT space.

But which technology is the right one for all the different players – both private and public – now looking to exploit these technologies to serve their users and customers and build new business and new service models on top?

To get a better insight into some of the critical factors involved in making the right LPWA decision, IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently spoke with Olivier Beaujard, VP market development at Sierra Wireless. Sierra Wireless is a company with deep roots in the M2M and IoT space that stretch right back to its formation around twenty years ago. Over that time the company has developed a full solution portfolio including embedded SIM devices, modules, gateways and connectivity and cloud services, encompassing 2G, 3G and 4G networks.

AL: Olivier, the LPWA space seems to be in a state of some ferment at the moment with many different technologies having come onto the market in a relatively short space of time.

From your perspective as probably the leading supplier of embedded wireless modules to a global market, how do you characterise the current state of play in LPWA? OB: The promise of extended battery life for devices, more cost effective coverage and better

radio performance for lower data rates all make LPWA very attractive in terms of making the IoT vision a working reality around the world. That said, as ever, within that LPWA promise there is still a lot of hype and uncertainty, especially where the all-important issues of standardisation, intellectual property and eventual scalability come into play. Sierra’s presence in the key standards bodies in particular gives us the ability to both closely monitor strategic developments as they happen and get a clearer view of the likely terrain over the longer term. Additionally, feedback from our customers gives us invaluable insights into the practical realities on the ground and how the strengths and weaknesses of each different option will eventually play out.

In that context, we’re continuing to see a steady growth in what you might call ‘traditional’ IoT applications that we’ve always been strong in, such as automotive, logistics, energy, utilities, enterprise and point of sale (PoS). Now, if you listen closely to the customers’ requirements, both current and future, while they might not care what the underlying communications technology is called, they do know exactly what they want from it.

For a start, the issue of cost is paramount and

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Sierra’s presence in the key standards bodies in particular gives us the ability to both closely monitor strategic developments as they happen and get a clearer view of the likely terrain over the longer term

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Olivier Beaujard, VP market development for Sierra Wireless has more than 20 yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experience in the wireless industry and machine to machine markets and joined Sierra Wireless in 2009. Prior to this, Mr. Beaujard was with Wavecom where he was in charge of product marketing. He has held several marketing positions such as marketing director, corporate business development director, VP marketing and VP of business development.

Mr. Beaujard graduated from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG - ENSERG) with an electronics and telecommunications engineer diploma. He also holds an MBA from ESSEC business school.

Olivier Beaujard, VP market development, Sierra Wireless

Photo: Didier Bizos

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scalability is critical in terms of keeping component prices down and addressing the larger market opportunity. Standardisation of performance profiles and form factors as well impacts design and manufacturing costs. Finally, there’s the overall investment to consider and how this will be paid back over the whole technology deployment lifecycle.

Secondly, there are the individual power requirements for each M2M/IoT module in its own particular environment. Even if a device is installed in a location where there is an external power source, such as in a car or energy meter, it must be able to keep working even if that power source fails. Even if it’s not classed as a ‘mission critical’ application as such, its operation must be regarded as seamless and trustworthy by the end user.

service providers. Indeed it’s already here in its initial phase, at least in our product portfolio with LTE Cat-1 modules that will be available in early 2016. However, the real market expansion and deployment opportunity comes with LTE-M, which is getting set in the standards bodies next year and will begin to see deployments in 2017.

AL: So, looking into Sierra Wireless’s crystal ball – backed up of course with your insight into the standardisation groups – what do you see as being the likely LPWA road map for the next few years?

Finally, there’s the issue of bandwidth. After a long period where the industry has focused on pushing up data rates and squeezing performance out of the radio spectrum that would have been science fiction only a few decades ago, LPWA instead is concentrating on lower data rates. That said, there will be many application areas and markets where it makes sense to be able to support both high bandwidth services, such as video for surveillance, as well as these lower bandwidth demands, such as smoke alarms or consumer appliances. There’s also the related issue of spectrum cost and availability and the impact that interference may have on unlicensed spectrum compared to claimed performance levels.

OB: I’d be doing myself and the industry a disservice if I didn’t also recognise the intense activity underway amongst some of the proprietary LPWA solutions that are being proposed – more specifically the offerings from the LoRa Alliance and Semtech, SIGFOX and Ingenu. The sheer breadth and variety of the IoT universe does mean that there will always be scope for more than just one solution but, when you take into account the factors that I briefly touched on earlier, the rate of current progress in the standards bodies and amongst developers and manufacturers like ourselves, we believe that the ‘windows of opportunity’ for proprietary solutions is not as large as might have appeared several months ago. We must remember that cellular standards are all part of a long established and well-coordinated ecosystem that reduces the friction involved in the evolution of standards and that is why we have chosen to work very closely with the 3GPP standards body on this.

We’ve crunched all these different factors together and for us the optimum path ahead is clear: the LPWA future lies in LTE and leveraging the existing LTE cellular infrastructure from the

So where are we at the moment? On the LTE side, CAT 3 is already here while CAT 1 will be due for formal release in early 2016, followed by CAT 0 and we expect LTE-M around the middle of 2017.

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the LPWA future lies in LTE and leveraging the existing LTE cellular infrastructure from the service providers. Indeed it’s already here in its initial phase

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LTE-M also offers continuity for vendors and MNOs in all the other critical supporting areas beyond the basic connectivity such as security, roaming, mobility management and OSS/BSS integration

GSM is also in the process of being adapted for M2M/IoT traffic and applications, in some cases to allow operators with existing GSM spectrum to use existing infrastructure for this purpose while migrating their human subscribers to LTE services. The technology proposed here is known as EC (Extended Coverage) GSM and is also due to arrive around the middle of 2016 (check 2017?).

Finally – and slightly further away on the horizon – are the NB-CIoT/NB-LTE solutions being proposed by Ericsson, Huawei and some others – NB here referring to Narrow Band.

In terms of our response to these developments, as well as being deeply involved with the standards bodies, we’re also working closely with infrastructure manufacturers and other major players to ensure that our role as a key module and gateway vendor is synchronised with their activities as providers of network and radio infrastructure. Once again, our ability to merge different standards into one chip – such as we’re doing to combine EC-GSM and LTE-M – but still fulfil historic physical form factor and connector requirements means that integration costs are lowered and time to market is reduced.

Sierra Wireless is putting in a lot of effort to help simplify LTE-M and we’re already working towards bringing module costs below that of today’s 2G modules.

AL: So what are the specific ‘sweet spots’ that Sierra sees LTE-M as fulfilling?

OB: If you compare the key attributes I mentioned above across the breadth of solutions required to support the IoT, it should be clear that all the standardised technologies do meet the critical requirements of LPWA technologies. It should also be clear that these standardised approaches offer much more flexible and lower-risk approaches than the proprietary solutions currently available. However, there are several reasons why Sierra Wireless believes that LTE-M is best positioned to become the standard LPWA technology solution of choice.

Firstly, LTE-M reuses several aspects of the existing, widely deployed and well-understood LTE standard.

This means that it will be much easier for original equipment manufacturers, solution vendors and network operators around the world to implement. In addition, this re-use allows LTE-M to provide similar low-latency transactions to traditional LTE. As a result, LTE-M can support real-time applications such as conversational voice services, which are required for some IoT applications such as automotive, security, smart home, and many other industrial applications.

There are some very interesting developments underway here such as combining WebRTC with IoT – this makes it possible to merge voice and messaging

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services directly with the IoT domain with the potential to create some very innovative customer support or sales applications.

LTE-M also offers continuity for vendors and MNOs in all the other critical supporting areas beyond the basic connectivity such as security, roaming, mobility management and OSS/BSS integration. LTE-M will use the same field-tested, trusted and standardised security methods that cellular solutions use today.

And, given that LTE-M is just a physical-layer change for operators, all upper-layer cellular features such as global roaming, billing, subscription management and general business support services will work seamlessly.

As if that weren’t enough by itself to prove the argument, LTE-M’s ability to share spectrum with standard LTE devices makes it a more attractive option for most MNOs than other LPWA alternatives, especially NB-CIoT. LTE-M includes mechanisms that give service providers the option of designating LTEM IoT traffic as lower-priority than voice or video traffic from legacy higher-revenue subscribers. This capability benefits everyone involved: network operators gain major savings in both time and money by using a single network for latency-tolerant IoT traffic and higher-bandwidth real-time services, while also avoiding having to carve out scarce spectrum for IoT services that may take some time to ramp up. The mobile broadband subscribers themselves also get more reliable services and IoT users get lower-cost subscription tiers and options.

Finally, amidst all of the complexity around LPWAs, LTE-M is the most predictable solution. EC-GSM is simply not viable in too many markets as its spectral efficiency is low, the cost per bit is high, and it can’t simultaneously support IoT and higher-bandwidth users on the same system. And, while NB-IoT offers some attractive possibilities, there is still much uncertainty around what will ultimately be standardised and when.

For all of these reasons, the market momentum for LTE-M is large and growing, with a broad global ecosystem for LTE-M already emerging. While no one can predict the future with certainty, LTE-M is well positioned to emerge as the preferred LPWA technology for tomorrow’s IoT applications.

As a global leader in LTE and the IoT, we have the foundation and portfolio for new LTE-based LPWA solutions already in place. We are working closely with ecosystem partners and mobile operators worldwide to facilitate the finalisation of the LTE-M standard and accelerate its introduction to global markets. We can provide the design assistance, technology expertise, and technology portfolio to help customers in any industry capitalise on LPWA technology to seize the IoT opportunity in the form that best suits their own strategies.

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OPINION

LPWA – the ‘Things’ finally get their own networks After you’ve been in this industry for a while, you start to learn to trust your nose when it comes to new technologies, writes IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis. Exposed to the usual hype, disinformation and vapourware, it’s all too easy to become sceptical – even cynical – about many claims that are made. Once every so often however, something comes along that does represent a real potential game-changer – and that something, this time around, does seem to be Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking.

There’s certainly been a clear need in the market for some alternative to cellular or satellite communications for some time now. With our obsession for pushing for ever higher bandwidths to satisfy humanity’s seemingly insatiable need for audio and video content to stimulate increasingly jaded palates, the much more

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humble and basic requirements of ‘things’ have been largely forgotten.

Coincidentally, these needs were actually identified around 25 years ago in a spoof paper (tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1216) “Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts” that proposed that there were certain applications that didn’t need high bandwidths, such as tracking glaciers and the US postal service. Another, subsequent paper even suggested ultra-secure, ultra-low speed comms using neutrinos, and military grade comms using tanks with zeros and one painted on the sides.

Putting the humour aside though, the roles and characteristics of probably the majority of connected devices and sensors that will drive the next phase of our migration to a ‘smart’ environment have specific demands. Battery life

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Out at a LoRa Alliance meeting in Rotterdam in early November, there was a palpable buzz in the air, huddles of folk in intense conversation and, from the stage, real life stories of deployments, devices and successful roaming and interworking.

And that’s only one part of the LPWA story, where a mix of different technologies are under discussion: some part of the 3GPP standards bodies, aimed at licenced spectrum; others looking to exploit unlicensed spectrum via currently unstandardised, semi-proprietary solutions.

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If there’s one infallible guide to a new hot area, it’s the number of analyst reports that get released on the topic concerned and the last few months have seen a flurry from various quarters – all with roughly similar bullish conclusions and the usual caveats.

Beecham Research is just one of these, predicting that LPWA could provide as much as 26% of the total IoT connectivity market by 2020 – adding up to around 345 million connections worldwide. According to David Parker, senior analyst at Beecham, “LPWA represent the most dynamic and potentially game changing development in the M2M/IoT market. The lower speeds of LPWA are the trade-off for longer range, offering networks optimised for machine connectivity with much lower deployment costs than traditional cellular networks. LPWA will both compete and collaborate with cellular and other network technologies to stimulate market growth with more connectivity options for end-users”.

The report also warns of the hype around ‘big data’ applications where everything is discussed in terms of the 3Vs – velocity, volume and variety.

“Our look at LPWA highlighted that there are many applications that are not big data and not necessarily real-time, interactive or immersive,” echoes Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of Beecham.

“So, from a connectivity point of view, the market will move towards 4G-5G for satisfying big data IoT, while on the other side LPWA and equivalent networks will address the low data IoT requirement.”

The Beecham Research report additionally investigated the increasing number of LPWA technologies including SIGFOX and companies in

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the LoRa Alliance, which are currently leading the LPWA field in terms of network deployment, industry support, investment and customers.

Most of these LPWA solutions use the ISM (Industrial Scientific and Medical) bands better known for use by short range wireless technologies like Zigbee, WiFi and 6LoWPAN. However, recent advances have enabled LPWAs to be established using the ISM bands over longer distances, up to 50km in rural areas and 510km in urban areas. Another LPWA technology with long-range, low-power characteristics is known as TV White Spaces (TVWS), which uses the gaps in between VHF/UHF parts of the spectrum, previously used for TV broadcasting.

TVWS promises connectivity over distances of 10Km and with superior in-building penetration when compared to 3G or 4G. “New entrants working in the ISM and TVWS bands are promoting overall market growth and providing a spur to action within the GSMA world,” concludes Parker. “Developing standards for the cellular operating community is a slower process, but the emergence of LTE-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IOT) will allow cellular operators to compete with these new entrants on a level playing field of range, battery life and costs.”

These developments – just like the arrival of affordable and mass market cellular communications in the 1990s – are inevitably going to have major and inevitably unpredictable second order effects. This is especially true if you consider their impacts on the evolution of smart city concepts. If we can take analyst reports as one important metric of a hype wave, then the large number of smart city conferences being held must also represent another signal.

Indeed, a number of LPWA-based smart city projects are already underway. Interestingly, India is very active in both these areas at the moment, driven in part by Narendra Modi’s announcement that India will create 100 smart cities over the next few years and complementary announcements from Wipro and TATA that they are exploring LPWA applications and running trials.

David Parker, Beecham Research

Prajakt Deotale, Tech Mahindra

Arnaud Vamparys, Orange

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is critical, so devices using these new technologies – LTE-M, LoRa, SIGFOX, Ingenu’s RPMA, GSM-EC, Weightless, NB-IoT – are intended to keep running for between five and ten years with no human intervention. Other issues involve the ability of radio waves to penetrate buildings easily and, as always, the cost and availability of the spectrum itself.

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Paul Egan, Digital Catapult

Our research so far indicates that solutions which have low to moderate data requirement like smart lighting, smart bins, smart parking and so on are best suited for LPWA networks

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He continues, “Our research so far indicates that solutions which have low to moderate data requirement like smart lighting, smart bins, smart parking and so on are best suited for LPWA networks. Solutions with high data requirements like connected cars, are not suitable. It will be interesting to see how these technologies evolve further. In particular, how might mobile service providers use these LTE IoT variants to compete against companies, operators and service providers using LPWA technologies? LTE IoT variants are definitely late entrants in the optimised IoT network space and would need to play catch-up with LPWA for some time.

However, LTE IoT can overcome one of the biggest disadvantages of LPWA technology – that is, network throughput. This advantage could make it a preferred solution going forward.

Also, one major consideration here would be that both LPWA and LTE IoT are device dependent i.e. there are no commercial gateways available that will work with both. Therefore, if someone wants to move from LPWA to LTE IoT, they would have to undergo an additional infrastructure investment to replace the existing devices with the ones compliant with the newly chosen technology.”

The issue of how mobile service providers are going to react to new and potentially subversive technologies impacting one of their historic markets is provoking a variety of responses. At the previously mentioned LoRa Alliance event in Rotterdam in early November, Belgium’s Proximus and the Netherland’s KPN demonstrated interworking and roaming on their

two deployed LoRa network infrastructures, supported by Actility.

One perspective comes from Arnaud Vamparys, senior VP for Seamless Wireless Strategy at Orange: “As part of our strategic plan Essentials 2020, IoT/M2M is a key diversification domain for Orange. LPWA is an important network segment of IoT and it is also the segment for which current cellular networks require the most important evolutions. This IoT market segment needs long-range networks for ubiquitous connectivity associated with low cost and long battery life connectivity modules, which is typically something that existing mobile networks are not currently capable of.”

He adds, “In order to quickly address this new IoT market, Orange is deploying a national LoRa network in France. At the same time, Orange Labs is pushing international standards to address these requirements with a software upgrade of current mobile networks. This second phase is set to start at the end of 2016 and will further accelerate IoT business for Orange. We believe that the most appropriate option for European and African countries is to upgrade 2G (GSM) networks with a new standard called Enhanced Coverage GSM (EC-GSM), as in a vast majority of European and African countries, 2G territory coverage will remain significantly better than 4G coverage until 2020. Territorial coverage - and not just population - is a key promise for the LPWA market with objects located virtually anywhere and not only in most populated areas.”

Vamparys concludes: “Aside from EC-GSM, the 4G (LTE) standard will also evolve to enable LPWA business with an option called Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT). This option still needs some debate to decide its radio structure and Orange is participating in these discussions to reduce potential worldwide fragmentation. Depending on what the final standard(s) will look like, Orange could consider these option(s) for some markets in Europe, where 4G territory coverage can compete with 2G in the short term.”

This apparent proliferation of standards within standards is also commented on by Paul Egan, IoTUK principal consultant at the UK’s Digital Catapult organisation: “It is accurate to say that

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India’s Tech Mahindra is also active in this market as Prajakt Deotale – head of their Europe Consulting Services operation – explains: “TechM is supporting end-to-end enablement of several IoT solutions on LoRA. It’s important however for organisations to have end-to-end services that span across IoT devices such as vendor management, network consultancy, data storage, OSS/BSS integration and applications development which are all specific to LoRA. Tech Mahindra has been researching the subject of LPWA extensively internally; with comparative analysis of the several solutions available in the market like SIGFOX, LoRa and others taking place in order to decide the applicability of solutions on these networks.”

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mobile operators globally have been slow to appreciate the opportunity in LPWA and to make any large investments. This is partly due to a lack of clear market pull from their customers, but more importantly because no standards-based low power mobile technology exists that could be deployed within their existing networks until now.

In September ETSI/3GPP approved the use of the Narrow Band Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT) proposal from a consortium led by Huawei/Neul, Qualcomm and many mobile operators.

Interestingly, this standard will now be integrated into Release 13 in December 2015. It is a surprisingly rapid development, adoption and approval of a new standard which could be seen as a response to the LPWA players.”

Egan adds, “Early entrants in the LPWA space included SIGFOX, OnRamp, NWave and Neul.

These new entrants all proposed the use of license-exempt spectrum for their solutions, but had differing business models. Neul was acquired

by Huawei in September 2014 and since then has been developing the NB-CIoT system to work within existing sub 1GHz licensed mobile networks and discontinued the work in licenseexempt bands. There are many differences between the competing ecosystems and the technologies - but there are many similarities as well. Both approaches aim to deliver scalable solutions that solve problems associated with existing cellular systems. These include: significant improvements in link budgets – in some cases an extra +20dB: a massive reduction in power by re-architecting the air interface to allow end-point radios to be switched off almost completely allowing for many years of battery life from simple cells; and low cost infrastructure deployments.

He concludes: “If we look at link budgets, most of these gains are achieved through trading bandwidth for sensitivity and coding. This allows for data rates to be in the Kbps range and below and still offer a high probability of the uplink signal getting through even in very challenging RF conditions and locations. Costs are also saved in the license-exempt systems by using commoditised standard product silicon radios. In the NB-CIoT, much of the system has been designed to remove much of the standard essential Intellectual Property (IP), so allowing

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chip vendors to produce devices at similar costs to the licenseexempt systems. This is a big change to the current cellular eco-system where a small number of players collect significant IP royalties.”

These key – and seemingly eternal - issues of standardisation paths are also raised by Olivier Beaujard, VP market development at Sierra Wireless, “There are many different LPWA technologies being discussed right now, all in varying stages of development, standardisation, and commercial availability, which is causing some confusion for customers. They can be split most simply between proprietary and standardised technologies. Standardised solutions are more viable long term than proprietary solutions because longevity is a function of ecosystem support much more than technology. We strongly believe that LTE-M will emerge as the preferred LPWA technology as it is a standardised solution that will re-use the existing cellular networks and not compete with them.

If we look at link budgets, most of these gains are achieved through trading bandwidth for sensitivity and coding

“LTE-M is the continuity candidate for LPWA because of how it builds on the success of cellular networks in enabling IoT applications and solutions. Taking a divergent path on LPWA risks too much as IoT enters the mainstream and scales from today’s levels to greater ubiquity over the next decade or so. LTE-M delivers a stable future with a combined low-power and low-cost solution which uses the strong, field-proven security mechanisms now expected by all IoT industries. LTE-M can be quickly deployed in global markets thanks to the re-use of 4G/LTE network infrastructure and we can expect it to hit the market in 2H 2017.”

So, it looks like another level of etheric hum is about to be added to our already crowded airwaves – only this time it’s going to be composed of machines and things talking to one another. Just as almost every household already has a usually unnoticed background symphony of whirs, clicks and buzzes taking place as thermostats switch on and off and central heating and refrigerator pumps burst into sudden life, we’ll be similarly unaware of the secret life of machines and their private discussions…

Olivier Beaujard, Sierra Wireless

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INTERVIEW

Securing the LPWA environment – a step into the unknown?

The arrival of any new communications technology on the scene always poses a conundrum: while it might bring promise improvements in any number of areas, it might also introduce our industry – and our users and customers - to an entirely new set of security vulnerabilities. Recent history shows that, in many cases, appropriate security levels have had to be added retrospectively, adding time and cost to deployments and eroding trust in each particular solution.

Against this backdrop, IoT Now’s Alun Lewis thought he should sit down for a chat with Loic Bonvarlet, product marketing director for M2M solutions and services at Gemalto, one of the world’s leading secure communications companies, to discuss the security aspects and challenges of the LPWA domain and, more specifically, LoRa. IoT Now: Loic, historically the great majority of M2M solutions have relied upon cellular networks for connectivity. Security issues in this domain are not only well-understood and based

upon many years of practical experience, but they’re also based on the use of SIMs. The LPWA solutions not based on 3GPP technologies - such as LoRa - that are now appearing don’t use SIMs. What security management issues does this raise for service providers?

LB: There are probably two main areas that are currently rather problematic with LPWA - as opposed to the cellular world that we’ve grown used to over the last couple of decades. Firstly, in the absence of a SIM, how can you provide appropriate credentials to each device to identify it in unique and secure ways? A complementary issue to this involves the challenge of spotting cloned devices, where a device or sensor’s identity can be effectively hijacked for nefarious purposes, or making sure right from the start that devices cannot be cloned.

The second area of potential concern involves the now fast expanding LoRa ecosystem, bringing a wide range of companies, both old and new, into the space. Expertise and experience in IoT security are not evenly distributed across all the

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The current ferment around the LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) networks area and, in particular, the emergence of solutions from outside the already well-policed 3GPP and ETSI standards communities, means that questions now have to be asked about the security techniques and policies used by these new technologies. At the risk of mixing some metaphors, while we don’t want to cry wolf unnecessarily, we also don’t want to have to close the stable door after the proverbial horse has bolted…

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participating vendors and service providers now entering the sector, particularly given the extremely broad attack surfaces that this environment presents to opportunists. As a result, for the time being at least until more formal processes are established, both users and network providers must proceed very carefully when it comes to joining together the different elements, data and applications that collectively make up an LPWA service. Some system, device and application functionalities might need to be disabled or limited to impose some level of isolation and ensure that any attacker can’t get the keys to all of the kingdom in one fell swoop.

IoT Now: The success – and revenue potential of the IoT depends on there being a pretty open ecosystem that’s able to share data across devices, communications links, gateways, databases and applications. How will the deployment of LoRa affect the security environment that all the other players in the ecosystem, such as application developers and device manufacturers, have to understand and apply consistently?

LB: Security has to be imposed by design right from the start of any project – or, indeed, right from the very first discussions with device and sensor manufacturers and application developers.

Companies have to make sure the risk exposures associated with the eventual end-to-end solution and its specific operational environment are well understood. Understanding the contexts in which the system will eventually be used is essential in applying appropriate levels of security. Security

by Design principles are both well understood and well established and involve taking into account both software and hardware factors.

Skilled and well-equipped hackers, for example, can even use probes on individual chips, extracting information and commands before they are encrypted.

It’s also essential to have plans in place to be able to manage your devices and solutions across the whole of their life cycle, because tomorrow’s threats will be different from today. This issue is particularly acute in the LPWA environment where the long battery life means that many devices will be intended to remain in situ and

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unattended and unvisited for many years, especially if they are in settings hazardous to human health.

IoT Now: There are always going to be some ‘civilisation-critical’ IoT applications – such as the utilities – where extra security will be needed. What solutions would Gemalto advise here?

LB: For critical infrastructures such as the utilities, or specific use cases such as the monitoring of high value assets and items, the security inherent in an LPWAN transport network today might be deemed insufficient to cope with the risks currently at hand. In such a case, by applying a thorough risk analysis, it becomes possible to complement the network’s security with application security principles. These, at a minimum, involve using both encryption and applying signatures to the end-to-end data flows from end device sensors to the backend servers actually processing the data.

Security has to be imposed by design right from the start of any project – or, indeed, right from the very first discussions with device and sensor manufacturers and application developers

LPWA networks hold a huge potential when it comes to realising the next wave of the IoT vision and the deployment of smart ‘things’ across an increasingly interconnected planet. We just have to make sure that our next steps are made on solid ground – and that only comes through a deep understanding of the accompanying vulnerabilities and tools and processes that must be used to protect ourselves, our business and our communities.

Loic Bonvarlet joined Gemalto in 2011. He has 15 years of experience in telecoms and wireless development, support, technical sales and marketing. In his current role, Loic is in charge of M2M services and solutions product marketing for Gemalto, including its Sensorlogic platform and agent, MIM and associated services, and security and secure elements in the M2M vertical.

Previously, Loic managed Gemalto’s application engineering team for the North American market, helping customer integrate Cinterion® products into their M2M devices. Loic holds a Master of Engineering degree in telecoms and networks from Grenoble Institute of Technology and works out of the Gemalto office in La Ciotat, France.

Loic Bonvarlet, product marketing director, M2M Services, Gemalto

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INTERVIEW

Growing out the ‘smart bubbles’ of LPWA connectivity - quickly Any observer of the relationships between business and technology over the years will recognise those slightly awkward periods between the first emergence of a new technological concept and its eventual acceptance as a part of everyday life. During that phase, disinformation from various players, each keen to promote their particular angle, is often rife. On the other side, potential users and customers of the technology are acutely aware of how critical their time to market can be for their longer term futures. They recognise all too clearly the importance of placing a stake in the ground to signal their longer term ambitions to their own particular communities and markets – and start generating some real revenue.

This, to a large extent, is where Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) network technologies sit at the moment.

IOT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently spoke with the CEO of LPWA pioneer Link Labs, Brian Ray, to get his take on where LPWA currently was, both in terms of its commercial and technological maturity and also how the demands and needs of his customers were being met.

Brian Ray, CEO, Link Labs

IoT Now: Brian – we first spoke at the start of this year when LPWA was still, to a certain extent, breaking surface amongst the wider M2M/IoT user community. With your Symphony Link solution, you’ve added your own software to the basic LoRa technology to provide more functionality. Where are we now?

BR: In an interesting place for sure. For our customers – both current and those we’re currently developing for – they emphasise that they need solutions today. Their reasons vary according to their business models, historic investments and technology strategies, but balancing both time to market and longer term flexibility issues are critical to them. They understand the advantages of LPWA concepts to themselves in terms of lower cost, long battery life, better indoor coverage and so on – but they also don’t want to become locked into either closed and potentially monopolistic LPWA networks - or hampered by the sometimes glacial speed of industry-wide standardisation processes where the vendor giants battle for strategic advantage. The right tactical move early on can undermine even the cleverest ‘big picture’ strategist.

The right tactical move early on can undermine even the cleverest ‘big picture’ strategist

For them, the issue isn’t around achieving global domination by one particular standard or network – they’re much more focused on creating what you might term ‘smart bubbles’ around their particular targets. These might involve connecting an urban block for smart parking or lighting; an individual factory, office block or mall; or a specific application such as RFID that needs an economic backhaul solution.

We’re also finding some other very interesting drivers as well from unexpected directions. One of our customers already had a large scale deployment of around 200,000 connected devices that historically had used WiFi. Because

of growing security concerns in the enterprises they support surrounding that technology, they’re now switching to what they see as being a much safer and easier to deploy end-to-end environment – our Symphony Link solution.

IoT Now: So what are business ‘sweet spots’ that you see early LPWA deployments as supporting?

BR: LPWA is particularly attractive to those customers of ours who are transitioning their own business models from being focused on the supply of discrete products or single services into much wider portfolio offerings. One customer is a lock manufacturer who has traditionally not had a connected device portfolio. Our technology has helped them develop a whole suite of connected products and services aimed at battery-powered retrofit installations. Symphony Link was able to solve the system’s wireless connectivity and cloud data problem in a way that no other technology they evaluated was able to. With the competing requirements of low latency required for real time control and long battery life, it was a challenge that Symphony Link was uniquely able to solve. In fact, we wrapped some of the strategies we used to solve these latency issues into a recent Symphony Link software release.

Similarly, we have a smart agriculture provider who is creating value through long life soil sensors, and creating a robust and secure way to connect these sensors to the cloud has been a perennial challenge for them. Symphony Link created a 2x cost savings in terms of infrastructure and now the system can be installed by farmers without radio planning.

IoT Now: What is your prediction for 2016 in LPWA? The LTE-M and NB-IoT movement will start to solidify, which might give mobile carriers more to consider when thinking about adopting an existing LPWAN standard like SIGFOX or LoRaWAN. Either way, Link Labs is in a strong position with our private network offering because we’ve taken the power of LPWA technology and created a system where integrators and OEMs can sell solutions today.

This is a very exciting time for the industry and we are thrilled to be a part of it.

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CELEBRATING 21 YEARS OF MOBILE INNOVATION The GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards, the industry’s leading stage for innovation, excellence and achievement are once again open for entry. With a brand new name, “The Glomo Awards” for 2016, the mobile industry’s longest established awards platform recognises everything from game changing mobile devices to applications, technologies & apps and services.

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