Lots of articles have argued that the first ever internet of things (IoT) device was a soda machine at Carnegie Mellon that was connected to the early internet in the 1980s. The machine was famously automated to let users on the local network see how recently the machine had been filled (and thus how cold the soda was). It’s a great story—but one device does not an internet make. In other words, what we in the modern era understand as the IoT isn’t really about individual devices; it’s about a tremendous volume of different devices all working together in tandem.This is an important distinction for telecom testers, because it gives a clearer sense of what challenges might actually arise as hordes of IoT devices move beyond industrial settings and into homes, cities, transportation networks, and elsewhere. Testing conformance for individual devices will be critical for network operators, but it will only be one part of an equation that includes load testing for large networks of devices, conformance testing for different layers of applications and sensors, plus dealing with emergency use cases. As a result, telco testers will soon find themselves in need of new strategies—and potentially new technologies—for ensuring high quality of service (QoS) for users.
Conformance Challenges
One of the most obvious challenges that presents itself in the current IoT landscape from a testing perspective is that the architecture of most IoT systems is a complex hash of heterogeneous technologies. IoT devices tend to work with a number of layers:- Sensor
- Application
- Network
- Backend