# Research Challenges for the Internet of Things: What Role Can OR Play?
## 2 The Internet of Things
### Development of Standards for the Future IoT  
By standards we mean guidelines for \"how to do\" the activities which must be done at all levels in designing, managing and using the IoT, not just highly technical standards, e.g., the Constrained Restful Environments (CoRE) standard for integrating constrained devices with the Internet. Standards are needed for application requirements, communication protocols, identification of objects, security,applications, data, information processing, and the service platforms [10]. Indeed IoT itself does not yet have a standard definition [11]! Major international standards development organizations (SDOs) including IETF, ISO, IEEE, IEC, and ITU are examining what needs to be standardized for the IoT to succeed. These efforts are focussed on the technical level, addressing data link protocols (such as Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID), Zigbee, Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC), network/transport protocols (Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), IPv6 over Low power Personal Area Networks (6 LoWPAN) and Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL)) and session protocols (such as Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The efforts of these major organizations are discussed below. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been specifying and documenting IoT standards for over a decade [28; 29]. This organization has developed protocols and open standards for connecting wireless sensor networks (WSN) to the internet. These standards include:  
* IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks which defines IPv6 adaption layer and header compression suitable for constrained radio links;
* Routing over Low Power and Lossy Networks (ROLL), which focusses on routing protocols for constrained-node networks; and
* Constrained Restful Environments which aims to extend Web architecture to most constrained networks and embedded devices. More recently, IETF has been working in the area of IoT security. A key project is the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) that is the most suitable way to achieve channel security. ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) collaborates with its partners in international standardization, the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). These three organizations, all based in Geneva, Switzerland have formed the World Standards Cooperation to better coordinate their activities, as well as the implementation of International Standards. ISO/IEC created a Special Working Group (SWG) IDO/IEC JTC 1/SWG 5 within its Joint Technical Committee 1 in the information technology domain in 2013 [30]. IEEE and ITU also contributed to this SWG. This SWG released a preliminary report in 2014 [31] that considered a common understanding of IoT, market requirements, standardization gaps, and reference architectures. ISO also produced this definition of IoT:  
* _\"An infrastructure of interconnected objects, people, systems and information resources together with intelligent services to allow them to process information of the physical and the virtual world and react.\"_  
A catalogue of more than 400 existing standards that relate to IoT was examined and mapped to the relevant IoT technology such as common interfaces and protocols, power requirements, and security constraints. The SWG has been disbanded and was replaced by an official ISO working group in 2014: WG10: Internet of Things. There are nearly 500 working documents on the ISO WG10 site that address aspects of IoT including reference architectures, interoperability, security, definition and syntax. A draft standard IoT Reference Architecture (ISO/IEC N13119) has been developed [32]. The reference architecture describes characteristics of IoT systems, defines IoT domains, describes a reference model for IoT systems and the interoperability of IoT entities.