At the 2018 IDTechEx event, held in Berlin, Germany, Government Europa Quarterly spoke to Phil Beecher, president of the Wi-SUN Alliance, about the importance of Internet of Things capabilities for smart, connected living.
The Wi-SUN Alliance is an industry alliance founded in 2012 by eight member companies; that figure has now grown to 180 members. Wi-SUN is an association dedicated to ensuring seamless connectivity, promotion of certified products, based on open standards for wireless systems, specified data rates, modulations and frequency bands. With interest from utility industries and smart cities who are actively searching for interoperable solutions, the Wi-SUN Alliance believes in the importance of end-users and service providers having freedom, whereby they aren’t locked into specific vendors. The alliance also provides testing and certification programs to ensure interoperable products, which gives customers choice, thus ensuring widespread commoditisation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Working in collaboration with other alliances, Wi-SUN aims to provide a forum for global collaboration in order to achieve smart city networks. At the 2018 IDTechEx event, held in Berlin, Germany, Government Europa Quarterly spoke to Phil Beecher, president of the Wi-SUN Alliance, about the importance of IoT for smart, connected living.
As the interconnected home, and even the city more widely, becomes more of a tangible reality, what kind of IoT applications can we expect to see in the future?
There are already quite a large number of IoT-based applications, particularly in the home. Within the home there are lots of applications and they’re beginning to become interconnected, especially with devices such as Alexa. I think we will probably see more interconnectivity between those applications. Smart cities are very much in their infancy at the moment. We’re beginning to see business-driven application use cases, such as connected street lighting and rubbish collection. There seems to be a lot of new communications technology popping up which is not necessarily needed. I would say that the applications for cities are increasing dramatically and I think the more interconnected they become, the more interest they generate.
The background of the Wi-SUN Alliance is from the utility industry and the electric utilities have a mature understanding of the use of technology and communications, particularly in applications such as SCADA systems. Whereas in cities, the use of technology is more recent. As every possible application or device is undergoing a smart transition, we are left with application verticals which are not interconnected but may benefit from interconnectivity.
For example, if you want to control street lighting levels based on traffic, bicycle or pedestrian flow, then the best way to do that is to have a distributed control network with a multi-service network, to which street lighting and traffic sensors are attached. It is then possible to have street lights controlled in response to local sensors for cyclists and pedestrians, rather than an unacceptable propagation delay, where sensors communicate back to the council office and a central application then signals back to the street lights.
The city of Copenhagen, Denmark, uses a Wi-SUN compatible network, which they originally deployed for a street light system; the business value is justifiable purely through replacing traditional lighting with LED street lighting, which includes radio communications. Now, they’re establishing interconnecting sensors so that they can control street lights and traffic signals, along with monitoring and optimising the flow of people, bicycles and emergency vehicles. Therefore, the system becomes synchronised and action is initiated at the place where the data is collected, not at a central computer.
What needs to be done to ensure that the future becomes the present?
Open standards are the basis for all of this. For me, the idea of having these multi-service networks is really important. The internet is a multi-service network; we use the internet to do our online banking, to look up maps through Google, as well as a wide range of other tasks, and we use it without a second thought. IoT networks should behave in the same way through a standards-based approach. Additionally, they need to be very secure and there needs to be a security architecture which enables support of multi-service networks. Effectively, this will ensure that credentials for one application are different from another. Interoperability is also required so that multiple vendors can deploy products into the same environment, so we’re no longer limited to a single product vendor.
How will certification and regulation ensure the security of smart, synchronised devices and their data? What types of problems will this address?
If certification is conducted in the proper manner it ensures that devices are compliant with standards and that they interoperate; standards are the basis of the certification tests, making sure that everybody is doing the right thing. Certification also provides a verification to end customers that if they buy a brand which is certified, then they can trust that it’s going to work in their network. Wi-Fi certification for routers and other products is an example.
Despite the view that the EU is one homogenous entity, when it comes to regulation this is often not the case. One of the very interesting areas in Europe is spectrum policy – launched in 2002 through the EU’s policy on ‘Easier access to radio spectrum: the EU’s electronic communications framework’ and the ‘Radio Spectrum Decision’. The European Research Council (ERC) recommendation 70-03 from the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication (CEPT) in 2014 included allocation of 870-876 megahertz for data network, including IoT applications. We have seen in countries such as the UK, Ireland and Denmark – which have adopted this recommendation and opened up that spectrum – growing numbers of smart city deployments.
ESB Telecoms has created a nationwide Wi-SUN compatible wireless mesh IoT network in this frequency band within Ireland. It is important that regulators recognise that the cellular industry, although a major user of spectrum, doesn’t necessarily provide ubiquitous IoT services. There are different networking topologies which serve different use cases, and I strongly encourage the spectrum regulators in Europe to make spectrum available for a range of technologies supporting a diverse range of applications.
How will we see regulation play into debates around security, and about how hackable IoT devices are? How can discussions evolve into legislation?
Legislation tends to take quite a long time and can therefore delay innovation. However, regulation is extremely important, particularly in relation to privacy and the security of data, but there are also less obvious considerations. For example, most IoT devices communicate using radio. A number of regulatory domains permit or require frequency hopping, whereby devices communicate on different frequencies at different times, yet some regulatory domains don’t allow that. As a result, this makes a jamming attack very easy to implement. Ultimately, regulators allowing, or even requiring, frequency hopping is a good thing.
Moreover, close collaboration between regulators and standards organisations is a useful endeavour, as standards are essential to deliver robust security. Standards typically undergo extensive peer review, giving confidence that they are “fit for purpose”. Security standards are robust and reliable and if a vulnerability in a standards-based security protocol is discovered then it gets fixed pretty quickly, owing to the number of people working on it and wanting to resolve the problem.
How does Wi-SUN fit into the landscape of IoT discussions and development? What will be your priorities going forward?
Wi-SUN has come from a position of providing highly secure networking for critical infrastructure applications, therefore, security has always been paramount. We use certificate-based mutual authentication for devices and the network. The technology that we use for authentication is the same used for enterprise networks and internet security. This means that there is a good skills transfer, where personnel that know how to manage enterprise authentication already have the same skills required to configure a network of millions of devices.
The role of the Wi-SUN Alliance is very much focused on establishing open standards-based large-scale networks. Therefore, scalability and accessibility are of paramount importance. IoT is inevitable, therefore we should embrace it and bring it to everybody on a mass scale. If IoT communication becomes commoditised in the same way that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have, then end-users will see rapid growth, lower costs, whilst still demanding robust security. The security protocols and the technology that is available today is sufficient to stop today’s hackers, providing that the correct infrastructure is implemented. However, with the advent of more powerful computing, it will become necessary to develop stronger security to prevent hacking.
Wi-SUN Alliance members work in the relevant standards organisations in order to develop the next generation of technology. But Wi-SUN is committed to ensuring that we can migrate from existing technology, which may have been deployed in utilities for 15-20 years and that we don’t strand devices on an existing network.
Phil Beecher
President
Wi-SUN Alliance
