Some Questions After Quad-Play

I work as an architect at a big telco that has recently become a quad-player. Part of my job is to think of what services come next. My previous interest has always been distributed computing, either networking or large data-sets. Also as part of my job I attend IT conferences on the internet of distributed devices.

My key questions & my current thoughts are:

• What will become the distributed identity standard for device authentication?
  • OpenID Connect (OIDC) (like SAML) is not an AuthN mechanism but extends the OAuth2.0 model. The identity attribute API can be used for profile loading to define a user’s identity onto the device. This can be a lightweight equivalent of a SIM Profile & also support the eUICC flows for ownership switch (similar to a Profile Content Update Function)
  • Any AuthN & identity solution must support the limitations of loading profiles on smaller memory devices & requiring an authN flow over HTTP.
• What will be the numbering & addressing standard for massively distributed devices?
  • This is more of an open question relating to the history of the service so that eUICC enabled devices will require an international mobile subscriber identity and LPWA & WIFI enabled devices will require a MAC addressing / IPv6 registry with the service provider.
  • The support for these addressing mechanisms and near field communication devices will have an impact of the network operator’s OSS IT architecture.
  • The GSMA proposal for eUICC uses the START-IMSI required for profile loading which supports roaming and allows for profile swap on change of ownership.
  • IPv6 offers a highly scalable address scheme. It provides 2¹²⁸ unique addresses, which represents 3.4 × 10³⁸addresses.  In other words, more than 2 Billions of Billions addresses per square millimetre of the Earth surface. It is quite sufficient to address the needs of any present and future communicating device.
  • 6LoWPAN provides a simple and efficient mechanism to shorten the IPv6 address size for constrained devices
• Will the smart device co-ordination be through an embedded chip-set in the main home internet router?
  • Probably not but I would have said probably not 5 years ago and I still have not seen Zigbee co-ordinators or Thread border routers catch on as stand-alone devices.

I’ve not been blogging for a while, too much work is not an excuse, but will be updating more on these topics soon.