IoT joint research

Topic Description

Over the last year, IoT has moved from being a futuristic vision to an increasing market reality. The Internet of Things is also considered to be a game changer in terms of the digital representation of the real-world (more precise and correlated data from real events and occurrences) and new ways of collaboration and exchange. An important action is now to stimulate the creation of IoT ecosystems, integrating the future generations of applications, devices, embedded systems and network technologies and other evolving ICT advances, based on open platforms and standardised identifiers, protocols and architectures.

The biggest challenge will be to overcome the fragmentation of vertically-oriented closed systems, architectures and application areas and move towards open systems and platforms that support federation of multiple applications at global scale.

Research and Innovation Actions

The scope is to create harmonised IoT architectures and reference implementations, integrating future generations of devices, embedded systems and network technologies and other evolving ICT advances. These environments support citizen and businesses for a multiplicity of novel applications. They address the issue of security and privacy mechanisms for devices, architectures, service and network platforms, including characteristics such as openness, dynamic expandability, interoperability, dependability, cognitive capabilities and distributed decision making, cost and energy-efficiency, ergonomic and user-friendliness. In the context of EU-Korea cooperation, the focus is on federation and interoperability of IoT platforms. It covers the integration of existing approaches and development of common IoT Reference Architectures towards joint IoT infrastructure reference implementation models and IoT standardisation, taking into account smart and semi-autonomous objects and issues of semantic interoperability.

Prototype installations shall be linked to pilots in the area of smart city, health care or smart service with smart factory and smart logistics. Proposed solutions should be experimented and tested through a federation of existing IoT testbeds.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of EUR 1.5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

• Credible cross-regional demonstrations of support societal and business applications through interoperable frameworks ensuring application and service portability;
• Interoperability across different IoT architectures models and IoT infrastructures towards complex IoT application scenarios;
• Joint contributions to International Standardization and/or Forum activities, and community building.