IoT has been a cherished potential revenue opportunity for 5G for years, but there have been skeptics of the link for just as long—including me. The challenge for 5G IoT is that unless the service is free, people would have to pay to connect IoT devices. Service providers are OK with that (obviously) but consumers and enterprises are more than skeptical. We have IoT in many homes and offices without paying for connection. Why not continue with that model?
One reason is the limited range of traditional IoT, which is based on WiFi or Bluetooth in most cases. As COVID lockdowns ease and people start moving around more freely, they’re more likely to encounter situations where their home/office IoT strategy doesn’t work well for them. Amazon’s Sidewalk may be an answer, and may also be a path to a general solution. That doesn’t mean it would present a path easy to tread.
Sidewalk is an Amazon strategy for providing specialized device access across multiple WiFi/Bluetooth domains, without creating a link between the networks that would present obvious security/compliance risks. Sidewalk lets Amazon pass some IoT data from one home/office location to another in a secure way, extending access to IoT elements. Users have to opt in to use Sidewalk, can opt out as well, and thus the coverage Sidewalk provides depends on just who’s willing to share their resources. I’ve not heard of any performance or security issues associated with Sidewalk so far, but some who have attempted to use it have found that few neighbors have signed up, so it offered them no benefit.
I’m not promoting Sidewalk here, in large part because of the limitations that user willingness to share impose. I do wonder if some aspects of the Sidewalk model might be a better solution to many IoT applications than a pay-for 5G service.
Sidewalk is a form of “federation”, where “services” of a network are shared with other networks. We’ve been kicking around federation in telecom for decades, in the form of interexchange or international calling. Network-to-network interfaces (NNIs) provide for the extension of service connectivity in almost every network service that’s widely used, from phone/SMS to the Internet. The problem with NNIs is that they offer network-level connectivity, which is too broad to support residential or business IoT access without major security/privacy risks.
Over the last twenty years or so, operators have explored making federation more flexible than simple NNIs. As we’ve come to think of a “service” as something that’s composed of a series of components or elements, sharing those service pieces has looked attractive to some operators. The Open Grid Alliance (OGA) seems to be targeting a form of this sort of sharing or federation, and in the past there have been initiatives from the TMF and the IPsphere Forum with the same target.
For IoT, federation seems likely to be offered at the device level, meaning that a network user would share access to their network, not in general, but to support accessing a device or devices that met specific requirements. For example, Sidewalk supports federation of devices that are on-network to a given user, but owned by another. There’s no network-sharing, only sharing of specific access to specific things that are on a foreign network.
A “tag” applied to an object to allow it to be found is an example of something that could be federated. The rule might be that 1) the tag is owned by the user requesting access, 2) the tag is in communication with an on-network gateway element that can detect it and its properties, and 3) the tag, the tag owner, and the network owner are fully authenticated by the federating authority, and 4) the use of the tag federation link matches the limits set by the network owner.
Having the ability to find a lost object that was dropped in another yard is an obvious example of an application that could have appeal, particularly if we presumed that in order to access a federated network to search for something would be provided only to users who elected to share their own networks for the same purpose. That might be especially valuable in neighborhoods or office parks where a formal association or a social connection among residents could promote collective decisions on federating network access.
The same kind of socialization might promote another level of useful federation, which we could call “app-specific connectivity”. Just as a tag could be certified as a federated access device, we could certify an app that’s looking for the tag. That app could then pass requests, via the federation agent (Amazon, for Sidewalk), to a device on another network, subject to the same rules I noted above. That way, if you’re trying to control your sprinkler system from the back yard, where you have a zone installed, but don’t have WiFi there, you could bridge through a neighbor network where access was provided.
There are a lot of ways of looking at this sort of relationship, but I think the only one that makes sense overall is that a service would be defined to represent access to devices or features on one network by users, devices, or software on another. In other words, we should be viewing this the way a service provider would view it, as a formal federation. There are a number of good reasons for that.
The first reason is that defining this as a service would define everyone’s role in it. The problem with having some sort of network-pass-through is that there are a lot of pieces that would have to cooperate and no way to ensure they all did. If my phone is going to control my sprinkler through my neighbor’s WiFi, without making me a full member of the neighbor’s network, then it’s almost certain that there would have to be a gateway element that would act as a proxy on both networks and pass only the proper messages through it. You can’t do gateways without knowing, and having the support of, both sides of the picture.
The second reason is that having support for this cross-network access is not likely to be free in all cases. The utility of having the ability to create a kind of mesh network of individual WiFi and Bluetooth networks is dependent on the coverage you can achieve. Might we see companies, service providers, and other entities deciding to pay to have their stuff cross-linked as a way of making their product/service more valuable? Could a cable company like Comcast, who aspires to create a kind of WiFi-cellular equivalent network, pay users to participate, perhaps in the form of a rebate? In any event, you have to be able to journal what you’re charging for, and prevent misuse or overuse.
The third reason is that we can’t have every possible device and application from every possible supplier come up with their own proprietary approach. The implementation burden, the integration efforts to get everything connected, and the security challenges, would quickly become insurmountable.
If we could get a formal standard for this sort of cross-network gateway access, one that addressed all the requirements I noted above, we could create a platform for mobile IoT without deploying any specialized technology. This wouldn’t address all the mobile IoT applications that might be targeted by 5G, but it would almost certainly address all the requirements associated with home/office IoT. Some 5G proponents might not like that, but there was never any realistic chance residential users would pay for 5G connectivity when they could use the WiFi they already have.
Federation formality (to be euphonic) would be an asset to the network operators too. I’ve already noted the OGA initiative here, though I’ve not seen anything to suggest that the body has the right approach to the problem. I’d also cite THIS TelecomTV that postulates a form of NaaS-think as a pathway to operators sharing infrastructure. That was the goal of most of the past federation initiatives, and a lot of progress was made by those efforts even though there was no agreement reached as a result.
Federation, in a nutshell, is a step toward NaaS, toward the idea of abstracting a “network” as a set of services and then assembling services to create what appears to the user as a traditional network. If Sidewalk forces us to think in those terms, if it stimulates the Open Grid Alliance to think about federation the right way, it’s served a useful industry purpose whatever happens to it as an Amazon feature.