Tackling IoT system interoperability

Stephen Evanczuk, Netynx Productions, Inc.
embedded.com (March 02, 2018)

IoT application development has already evolved largely into an integration problem. Developers can find all manner of IoT hardware devices that provide a growing number of near drop-in solutions for populating an IoT system's layers of terminal sensor nodes and edge computing devices. Developers can similarly find solutions designed to fill those layers with software -- from RTOSs in the periphery, high-performance Linux at the edge, and any manner of software running on the cloud's virtual servers. In practice, of course, building an IoT application requires significant effort in making all of those pieces function as a single system and application while ensuring end-to-end security, availability, and reliability. Worse, large-scale enterprise IoT systems need to do this multiple times as they combine separate, specialized IoT systems into a functional whole. That's a challenge facing many enterprise-level IoT developers -- and one Mentor Graphics hopes to address with its Embedded IoT Framework.

This notion of a network of IoT networks is a key requirement for success at the enterprise level. Mentor Graphics cites a view by McKinsey that 40% of the potential value of an IoT application depends on successful integration of multiple IoT systems. Integration of even one IoT system is work enough: Mentor notes a forecast by Gartner that in the near term, half of the cost of implementing IoT systems will be spent on integrating their individual components. Unlike IoT platforms, which are intended to simplify vertical integration of hardware to cloud systems, Mentor's IoT framework seeks to ease both vertical and horizontal integration of systems implemented on various IoT platforms such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Core, Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, and others.

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