Internet of Things Exacerbates Big Data Network Problems How Operators Are Responding

Network operators and service providers are ramping up their readiness for the Internet of Things -- and the IoT is mixing revenue opportunities with technical challenges.　

Consumers are about to go crazy for IoT devices, which run the gamut from wearables such as the Apple Watch and Fitbit health bracelet, to Internet-connected thermostats, to AmazonEcho cloud music players, to connected vehicles. Enterprises love the IoT, too, and they're using IP-based technology in inventory control, smart signage, and medical devices.

It's a huge market, with a projected $1.7 trillion market for direct products and services by 2020, and a $263 billion market for indirect support, resulting in billions of connected "things" within the IoT, with estimates ranging from 13 to 25 billion things connected to the IoT by 2020. on the IoT by 2020.

While much of the technology-driven conversation about the IoT focuses on endpoints (such as fitness bands) and back-end applications (such as social networks that track and analyze exercise), the truth is that the IoT is entirely dependent on secure, reliable, and highly available network connectivity. For the endpoint, that's connecting to everything from Wi-Fi access points in homes and cafes to 4G cellular data services to corporate networks. On the back end, service providers manage this segment of the IoT from the device to the data center or cloud, linking up with MEFCE 2.0, MPLS and fiber networks.

IoT presents many opportunities for telcos that provide that kind of connectivity, as well as for industry vendors that provide hardware, software and services to carriers. It also presents challenges because IoT communications traffic has different characteristics than traditional network traffic, explains MarieFialaTimlin, director of marketing at CENX, which provides lifecycle service orchestration solutions for software-defined networks, "IoT traffic is characterized by high-capacity signaling and low-bandwidth data transfer traffic. More events are happening within the network, which results in more data being collected. And when I'm talking about data, it's not necessarily consumer application or subscriber-type data-it's data that network events are happening."

She went on to say, "The IoT has exacerbated the big data network problem and created a need for service providers to manage their networks more efficiently because all of these events are happening in the system, for example, whether it's for troubleshooting or to ensure high quality service. It's really driving the need for lifecycle service orchestration because here you've got a big data problem and you're trying to apply all the cloud technologies that have been used to solve the big data analytics problem in the business world."

Planning for the impact of communications traffic

Dr. Hongwen Zhang, CEO and co-founder of WedgeNetworks, a security services provider, added: "Because the IoT is such a fast-growing market, when carriers try to do infrastructure deployments, they then have to do capacity planning, and they're looking at planning cycles of three to five years or maybe longer. How do you handle the rapidly growing IoT of the future with limited capital? One thing that can provide an answer is software-defined networking and network function virtualization. Spend your money there and don't overinvest in firewalls and switches."

Timlin added: "Operators must track network events for every network device and every connection to keep the pipeline up and running. They also have to aggregate events at the subscriber level, such as which application is being used. The best of both worlds is really combining those two types of data so you can intelligently decide when and where you need to add network capacity. That's where NFV comes in, because then you can do that kind of expansion more flexibly and cost-effectively."

Angus Robertson, vice president of product marketing at insightsoftware.com, said, "That means analytics -- a lot of analytics about network traffic." (The company sells software to help customers do enterprise resource planning systems, and his company will rely on those analytics for its clients.) He explains, "With the IoT, you have millions of devices available to provide you with additional leading and lagging metrics to give you a better understanding of your business and to help drive you to do the right actions from a business perspective to improve your overall business performance."

Robertson continued, "When it comes to big data, we say these three V words, volume, velocity and variety. So being able to handle big data that is always associated with these millions of data sources from the IoT is a challenge. It's important to be able to not only have the level of performance that you need, but also to be able to capture and integrate these data sources really effectively."

Mimicking mobile

RaghuRanganathan, head of network architecture in the CTO's office at global telecom equipment provider Ciena, hinted, "The traffic patterns and scaling of the IoT are reminiscent of mobile backhaul, and it may provide a model for the future."

Ranganathan said, "Within the IoT, most of the traffic is going from the source back to the cloud, rather than the opposite user downloading things from the cloud to the data source. Reliable connectivity is very important. Additionally, scale has to be differentiated from the idea that there are some IoT devices that have very low data volumes but high signaling traffic, but there may also be another class of devices such as CCTVs that are capable of sending a boatload of massive traffic."

Ranganathan continued, "What does the network look like? Why should it be any different from the way mobile backhaul is done? You have something that connects to a base station through an air interface, like WiFi or 4G cellular. You then have wired backhaul. For example, organizations like 3GPP are saying 'how do I update my LTE specs to give me more uplink traffic than downlink?'"

Ranganathan added: "This type of future architecture, it could be like a CloudRAN design, which centralizes and virtualizes baseband processing at the base station. As a network operator, I can use my SDN paradigm to program network connections to those CloudRAN endpoints to allow traffic to be optimally collected and processed on the network."

Traffic optimization and security

Many IoT applications are already consumer-driven -- smartwatches, fitness bands, home thermostats, for example. While no service provider wants consumers to suffer from service interruptions, however, all of this is not mission-critical. That wasn't always the case, notes Arie Goldberg, CEO of Omnitron Systems Technology, which sells Ethernet and TDM equipment.

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