The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key priority area of the digital single market. Over the past few years, a large number of proprietary or semi-closed solutions to address specific IoT problems have emerged. This has resulted in non-interoperable concepts, based on different architectures and protocols. Consequently, the deployment of truly IoT applications, i.e. where information of connectable “things” can be flexibly aggregated and scaled, has been limited to smaller sets of “intranets of things or goods”.
Global initiatives such as ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41 ‘Internet of Things and related technologies’, oneM2M, and the ITU Study Group 20 are important vehicles to agree on cooperation and take up of international standards for IoT systems. They also provide a framework to address new topics around semantic interoperability, security, privacy, and 5G/IoT interactions.
For a summary of how Europe is approaching new IoT challenges and market opportunities, here is an extract from the European Commission's 2021 Rolling Plan for ICT Standardization.
