IP is the glue

As we move towards the Internet of things (IOT), it's clear that we need something to be the glue holding this evolved Internet together.

The IOT can be regarded as the 3rd wave of device computing. The first was the mainframe/mini computer, followed by the PC/wintel era. Interestingly, both of these suffered from enormous security problems as networking and security was an afterthought (and we're still dealing with the security problems of the PC era).

The first two device waves were dominated by homogeneous hardware and operating systems. In particular the PC era continues to be (largely) dominated by the Microsoft Windows/Intel x86 alliance (wintel), and devices are connected (again, largely) via ethernet. This homogenous environment made it extremely easy to create a working network.

At the initial stage of networking, there were competing standards at the protocol level - Novell's IPX/SPX, Microsoft's NetBIOS, IBM's SNA, et al, and of course TCPIP. Once the world standardized on TCPIP, connecting systems became extremely easy and everything worked together. Connecting devices into a coherent system has been relatively painless, but we still live in a largely homogenous hardware/OS world, with minimal choice. Compatability is easy to develop and test (between Linux, Windows, Mac).

Think about the difference with the IOT, and we see hundreds/thousands of:

• Incompatible hardware configurations
• Incompatible CPUs, architectures, memory footprints
• Operating systems, proprietary and open source (and some devices don't have operating systems)
• Competing connectivity standards (Ethernet (multiple standards), wireless PAN (multiple standards), Zigbee, HomePlug, 15.4 technologies, etc)

According to Harbor Research's recent 2009 Pervasive Internet/M2M Forecast Report, the number of intelligent device shipments will grow from 73 million units in 2008 and to 430 million units in 2013. That's alot of incompatible devices, and we know that this diversity will only increases as new chips/os/connectivity comes on the market.

Really there is only one thing that is the the glue holding this network together: TCP/IP (to be specific, the Internet and Transport layers). IPv6 is the next generation of these protocols, giving the address capabilities needed to build the IOT (the IPv6 use of a 128-bit address, versus IPv4 32 bit address).

The path forward is clear - the only thing we can count upon to be standard moving forward is IPv6 as the glue of the Internet of Things.