INTERNET OF THINGS STANDARDIZATION IN ITU AND PROSPECTIVE NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to connect things of the physical world and of the cyber world to make human life more productive, safe, healthy, and comfortable by solving numerous challenges related to the environment, energy, urbanization, industry, logistics, and transportation, to name a few. Consequently, IoT has been an important topic of standardization in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in different Study Groups. ITU-T Study Group 20 was established recently to further promote coordinated progress of global IoT technologies, services, and applications. This article first presents a review of IoT related activities in ITU, and then describes a number of key requirements the IoT infrastructure should satisfy to make it economically and technologically deployable for useful services and applications. It presents several key networking concepts, such as software-defined networking, information-centric networking, and ID-based communication, while highlighting the prospective technologies that are worth further study in ITU.