Periodic Reporting for period 2 - F-Interop (FIRE+ online interoperability and performance test tools to support emerging technologies from research to standardization and market launchThe standards and innovations accelerating tool)
Berichtszeitraum: 2017-05-01 bis 2018-10-31
By 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to connect 50 to 100 Billion smart things and objects, paving the way to great economic opportunities and challenges. Forrester expects the digital universe to grow by a factor of 32 by 2020 compared to 2012. According to Cisco, by 2018, over half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices and the machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic will grow at an annual rate of 84%. According to McKinsey, only 10% of the economic value will be created by the “things,” while 90 percent will come from connecting these things to the Internet. However, according to the IERC and the ITU, the largest barriers hindering the Internet of Things market development is the lack of interoperability.
We are shifting away from independent products towards ecosystems of systems and solutions interconnected together and requiring interoperability. In order to be widely adopted, new technologies, products and solutions go through the following steps:
1. Standardization: stakeholders discuss and align their views on a common standard.
2. Conformance & Interop.: test and validate that an implementation conforms to the standard.
3. Optimization: in terms of Quality of Service, scalability, energy consumption, etc.
4. Market Launch: the solution is ready for roll-out into the market.
Each phase requires extensive testing. Verifying conformance to a standard, and verifying interoperability with other vendors typically requires interoperability testing events and interaction with third-party certification labs. The traditional approach is to organize interoperability events, where different vendors meet face-to-face to test interoperability by going through an exhaustive list of “interoperability tests”. Since this approach relies on scheduled face-to-face meetings, it has a direct impact on the speed of development of a standard, the cost of products implementing such standards, and their time-to-market. This is all the more problematic as it is commonplace for some tests to fail for trivial reasons (packet formats, addressing length, etc.). When this happens, vendors have to return home, change their implementation, and wait until the next event to re-test, usually months later.
Major consequences are:
• The current process is extremely labor-intensive, as engineers travel across the globe often only to find out what they need to make a minor fix;
• The cost associated with engineering time and travel expenses is often too high for SMEs;
• Time-to-market is unnecessarily stretched, giving vendors who want to adopt emerging standards a disadvantage compared to vendors who come to market with entirely proprietary solutions.
This process often scares vendors away from standards-based solutions. End users are therefore often and unnecessarily locked into proprietary solutions, as standards-based products haven’t hit the market when they buy their first product.
The goal of F-Interop was to equip the FIRE+ test platforms with online interoperability and performance test tools supporting emerging IoT-related technologies from research to standardization and to market launch for the benefit of researchers, product development by SME, and standardization processes.
More specifically, F-Interop successfully demonstrated:
1. A shared “Testbed as a Service” solution that integrates and extends several FIRE+ testbeds federations,
2. An Online testing tools for the IoT that enriches FIRE+ test platforms, including:
3. The support for IoT standardization and an enabler for a closer cooperation with the industry
The consortium includes the coordinators of the 3 targeted FIRE+ testbeds (Fed4Fire, OneLab, IoT lab). Its members brought the required expertise from complementary research projects and have strong links with standardization bodies (ETSI, IETF, IEEE, ITU, etc.) and international fora (IoT Forum, IPv6 Forum, etc.).
We are shifting away from independent products towards ecosystems of systems and solutions interconnected together and requiring interoperability. In order to be widely adopted, new technologies, products and solutions go through the following steps:
1. Standardization: stakeholders discuss and align their views on a common standard.
2. Conformance & Interop.: test and validate that an implementation conforms to the standard.
3. Optimization: in terms of Quality of Service, scalability, energy consumption, etc.
4. Market Launch: the solution is ready for roll-out into the market.
Each phase requires extensive testing. Verifying conformance to a standard, and verifying interoperability with other vendors typically requires interoperability testing events and interaction with third-party certification labs. The traditional approach is to organize interoperability events, where different vendors meet face-to-face to test interoperability by going through an exhaustive list of “interoperability tests”. Since this approach relies on scheduled face-to-face meetings, it has a direct impact on the speed of development of a standard, the cost of products implementing such standards, and their time-to-market. This is all the more problematic as it is commonplace for some tests to fail for trivial reasons (packet formats, addressing length, etc.). When this happens, vendors have to return home, change their implementation, and wait until the next event to re-test, usually months later.
Major consequences are:
• The current process is extremely labor-intensive, as engineers travel across the globe often only to find out what they need to make a minor fix;
• The cost associated with engineering time and travel expenses is often too high for SMEs;
• Time-to-market is unnecessarily stretched, giving vendors who want to adopt emerging standards a disadvantage compared to vendors who come to market with entirely proprietary solutions.
This process often scares vendors away from standards-based solutions. End users are therefore often and unnecessarily locked into proprietary solutions, as standards-based products haven’t hit the market when they buy their first product.
The goal of F-Interop was to equip the FIRE+ test platforms with online interoperability and performance test tools supporting emerging IoT-related technologies from research to standardization and to market launch for the benefit of researchers, product development by SME, and standardization processes.
More specifically, F-Interop successfully demonstrated:
1. A shared “Testbed as a Service” solution that integrates and extends several FIRE+ testbeds federations,
2. An Online testing tools for the IoT that enriches FIRE+ test platforms, including:
3. The support for IoT standardization and an enabler for a closer cooperation with the industry
The consortium includes the coordinators of the 3 targeted FIRE+ testbeds (Fed4Fire, OneLab, IoT lab). Its members brought the required expertise from complementary research projects and have strong links with standardization bodies (ETSI, IETF, IEEE, ITU, etc.) and international fora (IoT Forum, IPv6 Forum, etc.).
The project demonstrated the service platform enabling conformance, interoperability and performance testing for IoT. More importantly, it was used in the context of various standardization organization meetings and was found practical and valuable without changing the way the people involved work. The F-Interop Platform revolutionizes the process and methodology in these meetings by enabling remote and distant testing. This provides an evidence about the success of the project.
The platform main functionalities are:
• An innovative distributed architecture for online and remote IoT tests
• Interop testing tools, Conformance testing tools, Performance testing tools
• F-Interop Testbed as a service with a user interface
• Vizualization tools
• A universal resource repository for the IoT
In addition,
• open callers demonstrated the practicality and value of the platform
• standard development organizations (SDOs) stated the value and relevance of the platform
The F-Interop consortium went beyond the three objectives initially defined:
• Integrate and extend several FIRE+ testbeds federations with a shared “Testbed as a Service”.
o The 3 testbed federations and facilities (Fed4FIRE, OneLab, IoT Lab) were integrated.
o A common reference architecture model for on-line test and standardization support was designed and a “Testbed as a Service” (TBaaS) model developed.
• Extend FIRE+ through research and development of online testing tools for the IoT.
o The platform has been extended with new testing tools for interop and conformance developed by the open-call projects and benevolent contributors.
o Through the extensions of the platform with the open call projects, the modularity and extensibility of the platform have been validated.
• Support IoT standardization and enable closer cooperation with the industry.
o The consortium collaborated closely with standardization bodies and was, directly contributing to three global emerging IoT standards: oneM2M, IETF 6TiSCH and Web of Things (W3C).
o Two open calls were organized in order to involve SMEs and enrich the developed testing platform with additional modules and extensions.
Finally, F-Interop prepared its sustainability plan during the course of the project by creating a non-for profit organization (OTA), which goal is to promote and develop the F-Interop platform.
The platform main functionalities are:
• An innovative distributed architecture for online and remote IoT tests
• Interop testing tools, Conformance testing tools, Performance testing tools
• F-Interop Testbed as a service with a user interface
• Vizualization tools
• A universal resource repository for the IoT
In addition,
• open callers demonstrated the practicality and value of the platform
• standard development organizations (SDOs) stated the value and relevance of the platform
The F-Interop consortium went beyond the three objectives initially defined:
• Integrate and extend several FIRE+ testbeds federations with a shared “Testbed as a Service”.
o The 3 testbed federations and facilities (Fed4FIRE, OneLab, IoT Lab) were integrated.
o A common reference architecture model for on-line test and standardization support was designed and a “Testbed as a Service” (TBaaS) model developed.
• Extend FIRE+ through research and development of online testing tools for the IoT.
o The platform has been extended with new testing tools for interop and conformance developed by the open-call projects and benevolent contributors.
o Through the extensions of the platform with the open call projects, the modularity and extensibility of the platform have been validated.
• Support IoT standardization and enable closer cooperation with the industry.
o The consortium collaborated closely with standardization bodies and was, directly contributing to three global emerging IoT standards: oneM2M, IETF 6TiSCH and Web of Things (W3C).
o Two open calls were organized in order to involve SMEs and enrich the developed testing platform with additional modules and extensions.
Finally, F-Interop prepared its sustainability plan during the course of the project by creating a non-for profit organization (OTA), which goal is to promote and develop the F-Interop platform.
The F-Interop platform is definitely changing the way new standards are developed and interoperability tests are performed. This process traditionally required several face-to-face meetings with stakeholder that could afford to travel and attend these meetings. The F-Interop enables to perform these tests remotely, without any travel cost barrier. It enables to perform test any time from any place. F-Interop not only worked closely with SDO during the design of the platform but also was used at a very early stage to incentivize its operational use and check its relevance.
It is more specifically providing support for:
• Standardization communities
• SMEs and companies
• Academic community
The project has a triple impact:
• Wider standards adoption
• Faster availability of standards-based products
• European support to global standardization`
Finally and as planned, a legal body (OTA) was created during the course of the project to sustain the platform. Its impact is evidenced by the interest of various organizations to explore its market potential.
It is more specifically providing support for:
• Standardization communities
• SMEs and companies
• Academic community
The project has a triple impact:
• Wider standards adoption
• Faster availability of standards-based products
• European support to global standardization`
Finally and as planned, a legal body (OTA) was created during the course of the project to sustain the platform. Its impact is evidenced by the interest of various organizations to explore its market potential.