Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is widely used by railways, highways management, power utilities and the oil & gas industry, among others. It brings an end-to-end supervisory system which acquires data from the field through Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) or Intelligent Electrical Devices (IEDs) and connects it to sensors through a communications network.
The oil industry employs SCADA technology to monitor offshore and onshore extraction, for instance.
Some pundits are predicting the end of SCADA in the near future. However, a recent TrackTalk article by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation, Oil & Gas Segments, Alcatel-Lucent, entitled with the same question posed above, Is M2M killing SCADA?, arrives at a different answer. Sens argues that SCADA instead will adapt and include M2M, which is closely related to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) megatrend currently sweeping the consumer world.
After three-generations of SCADA (standalone SCADA, distributed SCADA and networked SCADA), industries such as the railways are now using M2M for part of their SCADA needs.
“M2M is revolutionizing SCADA by offering standardization and openness,” noted Sens. “Indeed several communication protocols between a backend and a machine have been standardised by the Open Mobile Alliance and the Broadband Forum. M2M is also providing scalability, interoperability, and enhanced security by introducing the concept of middleware.”
With middleware, the fragmented SCADA solutions with individual sensors talking only to their respective backend applications can be eliminated.
“Middleware collects, syndicates and manages all flows using open communication standards and exposes the data through standard APIs and Web Services,” noted Sens. “This has enabled the development of business applications and business analytics software on top of this middleware which can compute the information collected from millions of devices.”
Once example of this is the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). They have been pioneering the use of M2M to improve the efficiency of applications in use on 3039km of lines across its network with the ultimate goal of reducing costs by up to 15 percent by 2018. Their step-by-step rollout is looking to deliver efficiency savings and an improvement in operations, and does not emphasize a single technology or specific area; it covers telecoms, operations in areas such as point maintenance, fibre optic systems and rolling stock fleet monitoring, as well as other areas.
“M2M is considered the next phase in the evolution of SCADA and logical platform for an upgrade when the time is right,” concludes the Alcatel-Lucent blog post on the topic. “It finally offers a standardized, scalable, inter-operable and future-proof solution that does not tie a customer to a single supplier but still delivers the improved efficiency and reduced costs associated with SCADA applications over the past 40 years.”
And that’s a good thing.
]]>The Internet of Things is based on the concept of sharing large amounts of data – even if it’s a little bit at a time – in real time. The collection and analysis of such data can allow for better business intelligence, higher levels of safety and security, lower cost and more proactive maintenance, and potentially improved health and welfare.
But more connectivity and more data sharing also can mean more potential for security problems.
As a recent piece on The Washington Post suggested: “Concerned about people hacking into your email? Just wait until they hack into your bathroom mirror and release your naked selfies to the Internet. In an interview last year with Harvard Business Review, security expert Bruce Schneier suggested that the Internet of Things would be harder to secure than the web, mostly because ‘these are devices that are made cheaply with very low margins, and the companies that make them don’t have the expertise to secure them.’”
Verizon’s “2015 Data Breach Investigations Report” released in April 15 notes that 5 billion IoT devices are expected to be in service by the end of the decade and predicts increased privacy-related issues related to wearables and medical devices. It also says that M2M device breaches might become the source of breaches into the larger network and lead to the development of tools like Shodan, designed to take advantages of weaknesses in the IoT. The report goes on to suggest that organizations with IoT implementations do threat modeling and attack exercises to determine potential attackers and their goals, and then figure out where sensitive data lives and how to secure it.
“IoT security has multiple enemies: human error, poorly designed or tested software, paparazzi, individual stalkers, hackers, governments – the list goes on,” Scott Nelson, CTO of IoT consultancy Logic PD, recently told TMCnet. “Security is important, in many applications critical, but it is also fleeting.”
The answer to IoT security, Nelson said, “is a combination of appropriate technology, contextual awareness, and good business judgment.”
Alcatel-Lucent, a veteran of the communications arena, is among the companies that help organizations implement and secure their IoT and M2M implementations.
“You need to keep sensitive data safe at all times,” Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent noted in a recent blog, The Internet of (hacked) Things. “And you need to keep satisfying consumers with compelling applications.”
That, Alcatel-Lucent says, calls for solutions that:
IoT through its explosion of network-connected devices is what those with malicious intent would consider a target-rich hacking opportunity for creating havoc. However, as Alcatel-Lucent explains a holistic approach to IoT deployments can and will greatly mitigate the risks.
]]>
In business as well as our personal lives there are finite resources that gate our activities. The big one that covers both is time which we cannot create more of and hopefully optimize for obvious reasons. In mobile communications the issue is getting the most out of not just the finite but scarce radio frequency (RF) spectrum allocated for service provider networks.
Realities are that in most parts of the world mobile service providers have access to different frequency bands as a result of things like auctions and mergers. Thus, they have a need to mesh their various spectrum assets (i.e., bands and associated carriers) in general. They also must optimize them to meet the insatiable appetite of customers for bandwidth-hungry services such as real-time and streamed video where Quality of Experience (QoE). Indeed, QoE and its extensibility to cover anywhere a customer is located is now foundational for attracting and keeping customers.
The challenges of creating fatter pipes that can deliver the bandwidth the tsunami of traffic headed operators’ ways are daunting to say the least. It is one of the reasons why records continue to be broken at auctions for the spectrum that is being freed up by policy makers. To say the least, getting more bandwidth and extending it closer to the customers has critical competitive implications, and this has become a paramount concern specifically in the now hot race to deploy 4G LTE and now 4G LTE-A (Advanced) services. In fact, there is a need for speed by customers, and a need for speed to deploy mobile broadband services for consumers and enterprises at express speeds ASAP.
A recent TechZine posting, LTE carrier aggregation and the massive capacity challenge, by Hector Menendez, Senior Marketing Manager, Wireless Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, as the title says highlight how LTE carrier aggregation (CA) can help mobile service providers optimize the bandwidth they have to meet growing traffic demands and provide the QoE required to be competitive.
As Mendendez explains, “CA lets operators aggregate these disparate chunks of spectrum spanning across different bands by supporting inter-band CA.” This is the most common use for CA as most spectral assets that operators own have been acquired piecemeal over time.” He adds that, “In some markets, many operators are also turning to LTE-TDD as a way of further augmenting capacity of existing LTE-FDD networks…and can use intra-band CA to combine several carriers to achieve higher speeds as a way of differentiating their services.”
Additional Carrier Aggregation Benefits
You might think that on the basis of creating more bandwidth alone that CA would be attractive, but there is more. CA also enables operators to make better use of network resources through load balancing, and as pointed out in the posting can reduce interference and improve network performance via intelligence allocation of resources.
In fact, in many ways CA is like a Swiss Army knife, as the graphic below shows.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
Menendez concludes that: “Carrier Aggregation represents one of the most cost-effective and efficient way of addressing the capacity challenge and could be the biggest success of all LTE-A features. All indications are that we will see CA go mainstream in the not too distant future giving operators a truly valuable tool.”
That might sound like hyperbole, but given the scarcity of spectrum, the unusual mix of radio assets in most operators’ footprints, the need for speed to satisfy traffic demands in general and customer expectations, and the need to be competitive, Menendez is more than directionally correct. Mobile service providers have a growing sense of urgency to be fast-to-market, fast-in-the-market and best in market and certainly when it comes to getting LTE-A, and other advanced forms of wireless technology into the hands of customers ASAP, CA is going to be a critical part of the equation.
]]>The world of M2M is changing as solutions move from single purpose devices that transmit data to and receive commands from an application in the network to an Internet of Things where solutions permit devices to be multi-purpose and applications to be collaborative.
The Internet of Things can benefit from global standardization efforts that:
In today’s, world M2M solutions abound and not much architecturally has changed since the 1970’s. The Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems has described the definition of M2M as communication terminal independent of human interaction communicating with a core network or another terminal for the purposes of automating services.
Granted that while the network that facilitates the M2M communication has changed dramatically since the 1970’s and provides quite advanced capabilities (e.g., 3GPP Machine Type Communication), the architecture of the M2M solution has remained fairly static – A device in the field that communicates with an application in the core network for a specific purpose.
However, we are beginning to see paradigm shift for M2M, called the Internet of Things (IoT). Powered by the infrastructure of M2M, the IoT fundamentally changes the way devices and applications interact. We can look at this progression of how devices and applications collaborate using technologies enabled by the M2M infrastructure in much the same way that people collaborate using the social Web or in how commerce has been enabled using Web 2.0 technologies.
In the world of IoT devices once had a single purpose. But now it provides data or can be controlled for varying purposes across industry domains. For example, a pedometer can be used by:
It is the same pedometer but the data is used by different application domains.
Since the IoT is enabled by the capabilities of the M2M Service Enablement Layer, the IoT domain draws upon many of the benefits provided by global standardization efforts like oneM2M that help solve the challenges faced by the M2M industry today. Benefits like:
However, because the basis of IoT is the multi-purpose collaboration of “things” (e.g., pedometers, storage containers, and energy meters) there are challenges that are accentuated in the IoT domain like:
In this context, standardization provides benefits that enable this type of collaboration.
In fact there are global standards bodies working on these challenges today. They are providing definitions to aspects of the collaboration across application frameworks that enable an application development and execution ecosystem and provide a clear definition of interfaces for application providers and device (Thing) manufacturers. For example the work in the Home Gateway Initiative (HGi), W3C, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and oneM2M in the area of semantics in IoT. They are standardizing a common vocabulary and associated templates for “things” to be described in a context that suits the varying purposes of the “thing”.
One of the key issues in the exchange of semantic information is how the privacy and confidentiality of the information source can be maintained while still providing the needed semantic context. The capabilities to provide rights to the information source and anonymize the semantic information are just a few of the security that standards bodies like the W3C, IETF, ITU and IEEE are actively pursuing. The industry realizes that if privacy and confidentiality isn’t designed in up front and on top of the security capabilities (e.g., authentication, access control, data protection) provided by the enabling M2M infrastructure, the benefits of the IoT cannot be fully realized.
Realizing this, oneM2M is pulling these semantic vocabularies together in a framework that enables applications to efficiently discover, exchange and analyze semantic information across industry domains while providing the capabilities to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of the semantic information sources.
Standardization of the Internet of Things may seem like big hurdle to leap but if these organizations are successful, then the IoT is going to be a much friendlier place to work and live.
About Tim Carey
Tim Carey is the Industry Standards Manager of Alcatel-Lucent’s Customer Experience Division. Tim was recently inducted into the Broadband Forum Circle of Excellence to recognize his leadership in advancing the Forum's mission of driving broadband wireline solutions and empowering converged packet networks worldwide to better meet the needs of vendors, service providers and their customers.
Tim has over 18 years experience in the communications industry, working in the areas of solution deployment, system engineering and system architecture across a wide variety of technologies that include Optical, ATM and IP transport, switching and routing products as well as development of Home Networking devices and Network and Device management systems. In his current role as Industry Standards Manager, he is actively involved in a number of standards bodies that include oneM2M, ETSI, IEEE, Broadband Forum, Open Mobile Alliance, HGI, DLNA and UPnP forum providing expertise in the areas of network management, device management, home networking and machine to machine technologies.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is enabling the world around us to exchange data via a common network. This data will actually help us to understand the ‘things’ (objects and devices) in our lives and make sense of it. But how does the IoT improve our lives?
By 2020, the IoT will connect more than 26 billion devices and almost anything – your connected car, your dog’s collar, and even your entire city – will be able to communicate with each another. Cities are getting bigger and there are a lot of opportunities to streamline operations and manage scarce resources with IoT technology. Innovations in IoT technology are helping public and private organizations gain in-depth insight into the needs of their communities. Cities will become smart – developing strategies to improve their infrastructure, plan for long-term growth, create more energy-efficient environments, and keep people safe.
Communication Service Providers are leveraging Smart City technology as a means of attracting new consumers in sectors of critical infrastructure such as energy, utility, transportation, and all areas of government, by virtue of delivering them a value that has previously not been attainable. This value is derived through gains in efficiency that are achieved as a result of the interoperability and interconnectedness of all devices and objects that operate on the city’s platform. City services and operations will no longer operate as individual silos, but rather as a single cohesive program. Smart City technologies offer its consumers new ways to develop and act upon intelligence about their communities. Additionally, these technologies provide adaptable interfaces to best serve the needs of individual and unique cities as well as tools to manage city operations in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
Source: Verizon. Smart Cities Solutions, 2014.
But IoT isn’t just about technology. It’s about improving the everyday lifestyle of community members and considering the human factor in every organization or community.
Cities are growing at a faster rate than the world population. This will make for greater challenges in managing the operations of these continually expanding cities. IoT technology can help cities streamline their operations, reduce resource consumption, and enable better services to citizens. Let’s take a look at a few examples of how Smart City can help organizations:
Asset tracking will streamline operations and achieve operational efficiency like never before. Cities will be able to track the location of city assets such as utility vehicles, containers or busses and raise alerts when unexpected events occur. Let’s say a driver comes to a stop that is longer than expected – an alert will be immediately raised and and the city can find the closest suited vehicle to take its place.
From an environmental perspective, Smart City technology can reduce consumption and wastage of resources such as energy, water, and greenhouse gases by a significant amount. Boston University used Big Belly to install self-powered trash receptacles which wirelessly alerted collection vehicles when the receptacles were full. The result? On-campus trash collection was reduced from 14 times per week to an average of 1.6 times per week.
Smart City machines will enable better services to citizens by managing operations automatically, without human intervention. Intelligent lighting can automatically manage an organization’s electricity with technology such as activity sensors which turn off all the lights when no one is physically nearby and humidity sensors which adjust to find the perfect temperature.
The IoT and Smart Cities presents an enormous opportunity for achieving social, economic and environmental benefits. With many data sources, many applications and many stakeholders, a horizontal platform approach that spans across verticals and across use cases is critical to ensure success. The platform must be highly scalable, capable of interacting with many different systems and securely broker sensitive information to relevant stakeholders while protecting sensitive data and privacy of citizens.
What are your thoughts? What are the key applications and challenges? Share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to know what you think!
When he’s not blogging or on social media, Anthony Trinh (@Trinh_Anthony) is a fourth-year marketing and information systems student from Carleton University in Ottawa. He is currently completing a co-op term as the Integrated Marketing Assistant for the Motive Solutions Marketing group at Alcatel-Lucent.
]]>