24 May 2023
IoT Working Group
10:30 a.m.:
PETER STEINHAUSER: All right, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the session of the IoT Working Group here at RIPE 86.
Let's have a quick look at the agenda, so as usual we start with housekeeping, then we have a talk about optical wireless communication for the networking of things, then mart enbotter man will give us a talk about sharing global good practice in IoT, something very interesting for us. A few words about the Working Group itself, its operations, the charter, it's more like some question we have, and then since my colleague Sandoche is stepping down from his position as Working Group co‑ chair. We have the co‑chair selection at the end of the session.
Lets start with housekeeping, so the RIPE 85 meeting minutes are on‑line. You can all see the link in the bottom, so you can also go there, check it, see if everything is okay.
Then, this is the meetings validation, sorry for that, it's the old presentation.
And then let's check the Code of Conduct quickly. So, if any ‑‑ anybody has questions, please go to the mic, asking for questions, and please also say your name and affiliation, this is important for our scribe to have in the notes accordingly.
For those participating remotelily, you can ask a question directly using audio and/or video or type a question in the Q&A window and that will be read out by me or my colleague, Sandoche, who is participating remotely from India.
Stenography is also available, you can also send chat messages to the group or one‑to‑one messages. Plus polls, we don't have and you will see the participant list.
Okay, from there, I would hand over to our first talk, to Kai‑Lennert Bober and let's see what he is going to tell us about light communication.
KAI‑LENNERT BOBER: Thank you, I am affiliated with working for ‑ and thank you for giving me the chance to present this talk with the title optical wireless communication for the networking of things.
The contents of this talk are as follows: I will give a little introduction, tell you something about the optical wireless fundaments, I will say something about the applications, technologies and standards, something about the current status and give a summary and outlook.
So, me, I am researcher, as I said, I studied computer engineering a few years ago and over the last years I have been working in optical wireless communication and especially in standardisation, mostly at IEEE, I am here for my first time actually, thanks for having me.
My company is part of a Frauhn hover society which is society for applied research in Germany, there's 76 institutes all over the world but they are mostly in Germany. My institute is in Berlin and we are focusing on telecommunications networks, components, video, AI and some other topics as well.
What brings me here for this talk I want to see machine to machine communication as a subset of IoT, I am not aware of any strict definition but the new or future machine to machine communication may have very different communication requirements than classical IoT where it has sporadic traffic, properly not so high data rates and more about low power but if you have a lot of imaging sensors, maybe automation, robots driving around you might want to have high densities, you want to have low latencies and may even additional services such as very precise positioning.
So, I want to present optical wireless communication as a new medium for that. That means I'm going to, I am focusing on the layers 1 and 2 and the goal of this talk is to give a basic overview of everything, the current status and so on.
So, as the name says, it's all about using light for wireless communication. This is mostly untapped spectrum because typically we use radio and light has been used in a few devices but typically it's not modulated for communication. There's no big regulation for light, typically need to be eye safe and we are focusing here on the ‑‑ maybe I can have a lacer pointer here ‑‑ on the visible spectrum and part of the infrared spectrum.
Light is as, you know, very directional, and easily contained, doesn't go through any walls that are not transparent so you can achieve a very high density and the data goes where the light goes.
OWC is a general term, maybe you know the namely if I which is an LIFI) means visible light communication.
So how to transmit data over light. What you typically want to do is to modulate the brightness of intensity of LED or lacer or just any lacer, in order to transmit the data. For that you need to create a real valued and positive signal. If you have a complex base band signal you can modulate that on to a low carrier. For example, in the graphic here, this is taken from the light communications standardisation in wi‑fi, if you have a complex valid base band you should typically up mix this to a carrier frequency of let's say 2.4 gigahertz and transmit it in radio but for light communication you choose a carrier communication which is roughly half of the bandwidth of the signal and modulate it and you have revalued signal.
What you next need to do is make the signal positive because you can't transmit negative light. That's why you typically just add a DC or some offset to the signal so you can have a positive signal, modulate the intensity of LED and it goes over the optical channel and received and at the receiver high pass removes the DC so you can process it in your receiver DSP. So you can see basically you can just transmit most signals over light, you just need to add some little tricks.
What it's not is currently modulating the wavelengths light carriers directly so what many people don't directly understand is, we don't do coherent light modulation for now because that would be rather expensive, but we want to focus on very cheap techniques such as modulating LEDs.
Therefore, you can't just use any wavelength depending on what you want to do. Infrared has very beneficial properties because it's reflected very well and you can just filter out unwanted wavelengths at the receiver, for example you just filter out some light bypass sieve optical filter and sunlight isn't an issue any more (sunlight).
Okay. So, what is the current characteristics of that channel?
Typically, we have such front ends, they look like this, that's for example the ones that we build. And they support, if they use LEDs support up to 200 megahertz of bandwidth so you can have a single bandwidth of 200 megahertz with typical that are not made for optical communication.
The photo buy /OEDZ have limited bandwidth too. For infrared LED
ORN ORRASON: White LED so you can see the infrared has somewhat better response.
The optical power output is limited through the light source or the driver, of course also through I safety requirements and at the receiver the power is very limited because due to the intensity modulation the Pathloss is pretty high so if you go far away from your transmitter, the signals will deteriorate quickly.
What's another characteristic is you can shape this signal as you want, basically. As it's very directive and the line of sight has most of the signal power, you can just use lenses to make wider or narrower angles. You can also use sectorisation and just transmit in different directions. That means you can have narrow angles to make better use of the space or wider in order to introduce diversity, which is good against blocking so you have overlapping cones and you can receive the light from different imageers. You can play around with that, you can folks it very narrowly like to go over a distance of 200 metres, if you make it very wide it's maybe just working over a few metres, two or three metres.
Okay. So, some key techniques for modern OWC to improve the performance or distributed MI MO, that means in contrast to radio where off few access points per room because they cover the whole room with light, of course you need many access points, if you look into the ceiling, you have quite a bit of light, and with distributed MI MO you have a very tight coordination so you can transmit from multiple of these imageers by pre‑coding the signal and leveraging the spatial diversity.
Another one is reservation based medium access so because it's very directive we typically have hidden terminal problems so if here is one transmitter transmitting to the ceiling and there's another one they don't see each other or know when the other sends so typically signals would collide at the access point.
Two modulation techniques are optimal for different purposes, one is off keying, very simple, it has very high power efficiency because the peak to average power ratio is pretty good and has a long reach therefore. It works for low complexity transmitters. The other is OFDM modulation that is used in wi‑fi or LED, that is very efficient but it has very bad peak to average power ratio, that's why it it's not so power efficient but if you are in the infrastructure for example, you have a lot of power available. And you can use the bandwidth of the light channel very efficiently.
Lastly, the one of the newer developments is to use, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers instead of LED, this increases by factor 10 roughly.
What are some general use cases, over the last years it has been said that LIFI will replace radio or something like that. There's some applications that can make use of the specific properties of light. For example, it has very little random interference so there's no radio signals coming from some remote device, it has very strict confinement, it allows us a very high density of users like extremely high while at the same time keeping the data rates here, this high positioning accuracy that we showed, I will come to that later. It's confidential because you can shield easily, much easier than radio and it can be used in electromagnet I can sensitive environments.
I'm not the very biggest artist but I basically tried to illustrate light here a bit, it's a bit like having a cable‑like wireless connection, because ultimately you have your dedicated medium but at the same time you basically need a kind of free line of sight to have a connection so you can imagine it like little cables going to the ceiling, even while being mobile.
So, another use case for that is traffic offloading if you have radio and you need the spectrum for another application that might have sporadic data but very important one and you need coverage everywhere, you would have hotspots where maybe you can offload data to LIFI or optical wireless because it provides much more ‑‑ much higher density per square metre.
Another use case is similar redundancy, that means you have two different media and if you want to achieve robustness or the data has a bigger chance of reaching the destination, you just transmit the data over two different media, in case one is disrupted, the work maybe still works. It's also conceivable for radio and light.
Okay, so one example that we are following up a lot is industrial communication, that is meaning point‑to‑point communication; for example, at the ceiling of industrial halls where you don't want to put in a new cable you just have such point to point units, we are still minitiarising them and you can transmit as if you had a cable there.
Another one, somewhat more complex is this multi‑purpose access network for machines, the current concept is here you have these distributed units which are basically ceiling lights and a second unit that is controlling them over some network and this multi‑purpose light infrastructure provides a lot of services like communication of course, it has this multi user MI MO capability and low power physical layer and positioning as well.
In ‑‑ I have to say that positioning wasn't shown in online experiments but we so far performed off‑line experiments which showed that if you have enough lights in the feeling you can reach accuracies below three centimetres, depending on the bandwidth we might be able to reach even more so this is ongoing work, which is pretty impressive because most other radio based technologies are somewhat less accurate.
Another big use case right now is secure communication, that means for information security or confidentiality, for example for a safety authorities or for transmitting medical patient data, and also robustness against ‑‑ against jamming of medical devices, critical backhaul links or, for example, factories. We had people come to us and saying, oh that's really interesting because they are afraid of someone driving around with a jammer around their factory and just breaking down the production which would cost actually multiple thousands of euros per minute.
So, OWC could be part of a comprehensive security concept, mostly as an alternative to RF and shielding because it's much easier to prevent leakage through walls or files.
So, after that I want to give you quick overview of what the current standards there are in technologies, what we are not looking into here are remote controls of course, they are strictly speaking optical wireless communication because they use infrared lights you probably know this from 20 years ago, IRD A, I had one of my first phones, you could exchange ring tones with it and stuff. Free space optics which is the big brother of optical wireless communication using very narrow lasers and tracking, for example to transmit multiple tens of gigabits on land or even earth and space.
So some technologies nowadays with proprietiry but we there's roughly 4 standards for optical wireless communication, the first one is ITU‑T G 9991, this is an ITOT recommendation group for home networking which was earlier used just to prototype light communication devices because it had some co‑ex mode and you could use it, why not use it over light, now it was extended to support light communication a bit but it's not very specified ‑‑ specific for light communication.
Another one is IEEE 802.15 .7, mostly optical camera communication, you can use ordinary cameras to communicate, even more MIMO by selecting the individual picks else so you can transmit data streams in parallel, the two most recent are IEEE 15.13 which was finished this year two months ago and another one that is not yet finished but will finish this year is IEEE P 802 .11B B which you probably can recognise as a new amendment to the wi‑fi standard so this one is became to go introduce light as medium into wi‑fi.
Okay. So, maybe I will go a bit quicker over this. ITU‑T standard has been developed by the Q 18/SC 15 and is available on the web. You can download T originally it was for power line, phone line, and now they added mobility to it. The benefit of this one is there's a lot of chips available so most of the existing products are using that standard.
The idea behind 11BB is to add light to wi‑fi by just reusing the existing physical layer in Mac protocols so the idea is since the light communication market is very small, vendors won't go and build a whole new because it's really expensive, multiple millions of dollars so they want to reuse the existing protocols and everything and there's two ways, either you ‑‑ this is like the clean way, either you take the IQs samples or the IQ signal and just modulate it directly on the low IF, as I said before, and there's like an unclean way because typically Wi‑Fi chip sets include the radio mixing part. This is because it's just integrated, you can still reuse it and instead of mixing up the signal on to the light carrier you just down mix the signal and you could reuse existing chip sets.
As I said, the standard is currently in finalisation and I guess it's finished this year, is my best guess.
The standard set finished this year, I was part of the task group finishing that as to the whole IEEE 802.15 Working Group is named they rebranded themselves to wireless specialty application some time ago, this standard is mostly for specialty applications so it's not for the mass market, this supports these new features that are quite important for optical wireless, for example distributed MIMO, having these distributed signal processing, then it has the two optimal physical layers and a deterministic Mac.
Unfortunately, since it's very new, and rather niche software there's no chip sets yet but we are currently working on developing prototypes and evaluating them, maybe fixing bugs over the next time. This all going on mostly in FPGA and software.
So, as I said, the current OWC market is not big but some companies have actually working products, some kind of first generation of LIFI, some companies are signifying pure LIFI, we also have some products and they are mostly based on the ITU‑T standard. Since we don't have a mass market yet, the next step would be to integrate it into devices but you need an interesting business case for device manufacturers and everything to do so and the cost needs to justify the added value. However, most applications are now these that I showed, these industry, security and some offices and schools have very high densities.
Okay, so, the technology is fundamentally working but the potential is not fully utilised yet. For the whole industry things you need a very high quality of service, that would mean in IEEE time sensitive networking, IETF term would be debt nets I guess, and for example the service positioning is not yet included.
So another ongoing work is to integrate it with power line actually, we actually did this in a project that we could plug in a power line adapter into wall socket and just have an access point connected to the power in the ceiling and could just transit data, like basically bridge a LAN or Ethernet cable over that.
And then lastly, the next generation is currently being developed that means realtime protocols, more laser and beam steering, more lasers always being good.
The project 5G compass which aims to integrating all OWC into heat row general us 5G networks. The goal is to have ubiquitous high data rates using 5G RAN and cheap local area technologies among others, these need to be integrated with 5G core and we are building smooth handover based on open interfaces and machine learning based optimisation. There is a consortium of 15 partners and funded by the German federal ministry of transport and digital infrastructure.
As a conclusion one can say light is a new mobile wireless medium, form part of few due ‑‑ machine to machine communication, if you have a use case of that, think of object wireless communication it might be suitable technology.
First generation is available as a Layer 2 technology and new developments are underway, the mass market is not yet established because we need to increase the utility to cost ratio and all these different applications and ultimately build OWC‑specific chip sets. Thank you. I am open for questions.
PETER STEINHAUSER: I don't see any questions in the queue.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am Melissa, this is comment, not a question. I am currently working on a project in a university about evolution of fibre and optical seen wireless communication, and I want to say its presentation is really good and it's useful for my work and I agreed with you that optical is the future of mobile networks and everything.
KAI‑LENNERT BOBER: Thank you, thank you for your comment.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Andrei from Deutsche Telekom, I get some experience in optical communication from ‑‑ and radio experience and what we have seen most often that there are problem in use in wireless communication, optical communication in outdoor cases so from my point of view to bring in this idea into the mass market we have to enable some features to get more stability, less interferences and make it usable in outdoor use cases, and if we can fit this goal I'm sure we are very good product. Are there any ideas how to handle this?
KAI‑LENNERT BOBER: Thank you, we have got some experience with outdoors. I didn't go into detail because I guess I thought IoT here, I will keep it to indoors. We have a lot of experience with putting optical next to millimetre wave, because it's an obvious alternative and we had experiments that actually if you let this run over two years, the properties of millimetre wave and optical are somewhat the opposite, like if you have rain, optical works very well, if you have fog millimetre works very well, and so these could combined lead to stable link. Otherwise, optical of course, if you have ‑‑ if you have fog, it doesn't work because you don't have a line of sight, you can't see through it.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Vesna here from RIPE NCC. Can you say something more about the sustainability considerations for these solutions, with regards to production, disposal and energy consumption? Thank you.
KAI‑LENNERT BOBER: Okay. So, first the production, to my knowledge you can use ordinary components. You use LEDs for now, and mostly in our prototypes we use LEDs that you can just buy, you just have normal PC Bs, but the thing is that it's not yet integrated so mostly we are on a ‑‑ like very small integration and efficiency improvement would be the next step, as also using lasers that are more power efficient would be very good. Otherwise, I am not entirely sure about the product consumption. For now it also depends on the traffic, if you use visible you can reuse that of course, but I can't give you definite numbers about that. Most electronics, the less you use the better, of course. If you have a lot of lights on the ceiling you need a lot of access points and electronics. So I guess it's more something for very specific use cases, in my personal opinion like for example in industrial halls where you would have very specific lighting anyway and it really serves or gives you a big utility compared to the price you pay and in terms of resources and energy.
VESNA MANOJLOVIC: Thank you.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Any other questions for the moment? Okay, then, thank you very much, great talk.
KAI‑LENNERT BOBER: Thank you.
(Applause)
PETER STEINHAUSER: Yes, and then I will hand over to Maarten, thank you so much for coming today.
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: Good morning, everybody. Something completely different. I really appreciate the presentation just given, my technical knowledge is well below the average in this room; nevertheless, we need to stand together if we want this world to thrive with technical means and this is why also you work has become so multi‑disciplinary, so relevant for the globe ‑‑ how can we build global trust in this IoT complement to the world that will help us to run the world better.
So, I will go very quickly over some slides but it's clear all these things from a societal perspective comes with benefits as well as challenges and this is true here too for IoT. The benefits are really that it offers new tools, new means to manage things that you couldn't manage, couldn't afford to manage in any other ways, useful infrastructures measuring ways ‑‑ things like that.
On the other hand, it does come with the challenge, though, how do we govern this in the way that the world can benefit from it that we can trust it across borders, because all these components come from anywhere. This could be an IoT device and just to stress the point I would like to make, what conditions issued ‑‑ be standard to is very much dependent on how you apply it, whether you put it in a child's toy or in an airplane or in a building, the same device may be used in all three use cases. So that's important to understand.
And then it comes also with a lot of data collection, data sharing, data use, of which it should be very clear how this is done nowadays, because, in this digital world we could make a movie of most of you if you don't have any restrictions on how that could be used.
And security is key for anything we do with the Internet.
It's really ‑‑ so my focus is on how can we address specific address society issues at global level, you will find that if you think about the different sustainability development goals that are set for the world, that the world sort of agrees upon how much the Internet is a facilitator tool and necessary to make it happen and how much IoT in that the component of eyes and ears and hands and feet to it is crucial to make it work, very simple example is agriculture where you can have crop optimisation thanks to measuring and to actors, that is really put the right resources in, but also in health, the monitoring and even the ability to give you the right sense of incident at the right moment, maybe even some in the room may carry this but this is now the real life application.
So there's many applications, infrastructural, indoors and even in the body, and it's important that we consider that if we think about, so what should we talk about at global level, the light application I can see as a very useful complement in some environments and maybe less so in others, as explained before. It's not about one thing or the other; it's about end end end and what works best.
The global approach is very much based on the understanding that IoT is merely an extension of the Internet, just like social media, access to information, at least AI to big data. But it does have specific characteristics that will also co‑determine the future development of networks and networks that are part of the Internet as the Internet.
The collecting, storing and providing access to many data I mentioned already, but also the autonomy of the networks, using activators, so things that do something that action following received for specific data, according to some algorithms and nowadays I would say AI ‑‑ which has been coming up a lot. And the possibility to recognise in a way even your heater at home to put it simple and not only talk about ‑‑ to use against you, use your cameras to spy in on your meetings, again the light option may be there, part of the solution.
So, the dynamic coalition is describing to discuss this in a multi‑stakeholder way on a global level so have the technical community in the room but also has service providers in the room, also have to users in the room and government in the room and to meet on equal terms. This does require outputting the minds because, yes, when I am at a RIPE meeting I find you use jargon and I have grown to be comfortable with that. If you go to a government meeting you will have the same experience, different jargon but it's important that you meet and discuss these things together because the solution will not come from one of the stakeholder groups, it has to come together.
Over the years we came to at least one thing and that is good practice principle and at least in the design and the development and the deployment of these systems, considerations are taken into account from the outset, both in the development, deployment and use phases of the lifecycle, and thus to find ethical and sustainable way ahead to use IoT to create a free, secure and enabling rights environment, a future we want.
Now, if you think of ethical considerations, in a global context it's not what you think is ethical or what the Chinese would think is ethical or what the Americans would think is ethical. It's about not deceiving, it's about transparency, it's about taking responsibility, accepting that, being real, basically.
So, the thinking and summary of this this IGP DC, we need to embrace IoT to address the societal challenges. It's not about limiting its application, it's about making best use of it in a safe way. It's creating an IoT environment also that encourages investments because we need IoT to help this world to become more sustainable place and that requires things like legal clarity and things like that. You need to ‑‑ if ‑‑ as an investor, as a person that wants to put money in it, you need to know that it has some chance to move forward in a market but also from a regulatory context, for instance.
And the emergence of this trust at IoT environment requires more and more concept design, when I started my career, I was still working with people who built their own PC, nowadays why would you? Only if it's at university project or something, so for IoT environments it's often still the same, the Wi‑Fi environment, as was ‑‑ the LIFI environment, as was just explained, it's not scaleable, it is not easy to use it, but that will come, so design by the outset to be trusted, to be used by the right level of users will be really important. And one way of making sure this is continues going, let's also make sure it's not one single choice we end up with but real choice.
So the key challenges I see today is the ethical application of IoT, so what core values from a global level in this global environment that together is shaping this network of networks that includes IoT? How do we do that? Think about it, talk about it and continue talking about it because we never have one answer.
Trusted IoT, security, stability, how do we ensure that IoT can be trusted, also not to be harmful to its users nor to the wider Internet, how can we assure we can count on it to function? Because it may well have some critical functions.
And sustainability from the outset, thank you for asking that question too. Anything we designed today we need to think beforehand not only how it can help to keep the environment better but how also how it in itself makes the least use of energy and materials, most effectively way.
And for deployment, the last factor, is more a global thing for say here in the region, it's how do we make it affordable and usable wherever we are, and I am talking with a colleague from El Salvador who is looking forward to bring it into hackathons with students in the area to get a feel of how in the region it can be used best, it's these kind of things are important too.
Now, why am I standing here and asking you for a little bit of your time is because I want to leverage the work that we do and to ensure that you also at least in the back of your mind whenever you do something think of this global context in doing this and maybe even contribute to the global debate, as I know some of you in this room do. If you feel there's value in progressing and understanding of healthy development and deployment of IoT, your voice is needed and please help me progress this towards IGF 2023 which is an excellent multi‑stakeholder platforms to talk about these issues and beyond and I got in this dataset some also addresses where you can find more information and how you can contact me. So I am very open to any questions, suggestions, and this was my presentation.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Blake. Thank you very much for those, it's really helpful and informative. I think unfortunately a lot of the issues that we are seeing coming out of IoT‑type devices, doing bad things on the Internet often stem from the fact that they are made in southeast Asian countries where basically no one from that community is in this room on on the IGF side are you aware of initiatives to reach out to that community to ensure the stuff that's getting in China and southeast Asia is malware‑free and so forth?
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: I think if I get you right, and please correct me when I give the wrong answer, but there's two things, one is that for also Internet standards they are voluntary, they are based on best practice and people use it and even all countries want to be part of it in some way or another because that brings so much and I think that is true here too. At the same time as you may know but I am also on the ICANN board, in ICANN we look a lot the DNS abuse, abuse of the domain name system and what we can help to do ‑‑ to protect that. I think the same thing is true for IoT we need to actively monitor and become aware of what is important that we need to address and need to tackle together. Because one thing is clear, you cannot just stop these things; all you can do is be aware and try to guide it and maybe limit it but you cannot even count on every government in the world within its country to suppress abnormalities or attacks or things like that so it's the debate is about common understanding of how we do best in reality that in a normal controls, it was an illusion, I think.
SANDOCHE BALAKRICHENAN: Online. So ‑‑ is asking for the URL of the idea of practices document on the slides, he is asking online?
PETER STEINHAUSER: If I understand it right ‑‑
SANDOCHE BALAKRICHENAN: It's here.
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: All is forgiven.
VESNA MANOJLOVIC: If I could also ask you to go back to the slide where you had those four principles, yes.
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: Key challenges
VESNA MANOJLOVIC: Do you also have some internal guidance or what is your idea on balancing some of these contradictory goals that you have there? So like the growth of IoT and the sustainability at the same time?
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: I think it's important to realise that IoT is there to help sustainability as well, so IoT devices may be a little bit polluting but as a system they can contribute on the other side in, for instance, here in Rotterdam the harbour is full of IoT devices sniffing the air, warning if things go wrong, the traffic around Rotterdam is tremendous, so dynamic management systems help keep that flowing so this is an investment, it's extra materials that we use, some extra imaging we use yet at the same time if you do that, let's do it in the most conscious way where we keep the materials down and the energy used down and keep into account what it delivers as well.
VESNA MANOJLOVIC: I agree and I heard that you mention hackathons the last time we had a meeting in Rotterdam we actually held an IoT hackathon too and I am interested in working together to organise the next one where we could focus more on sustainability and IoT in the future.
MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: We need to build in from design.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you very much Maarten, for this great insight.
(Applause)
So, I know the people of you who have subscribed to the RIPE IoT mailing list of this Working Group, I think you are aware that this Working Group was never a very active Working Group, like Address Policy as a good example where there's a lot of things going on. So, this Working Group released a BCOP document the RIPE‑759, there was a good collaboration with Working Group members but afterwards that activity died down so Sandoche and I we thought it might be a good idea to use this forum to ask you, as people who work with IoT, what we could do so we were thinking about reasons, so I mean the Working Group charter, I put it here, it has a very, very broad scope, so it tries to cover everything about IoT, and one question was: Is this maybe too broad? Should we select certain areas in IoT where we focus on to ‑‑ of more activity, more active participation in the Working Group? And also a question should we work more closely with other Working Groups, so we have maybe some overlapping fields. I had a conversation yesterday with Chair of the IPv6 Working Group where we might have connecting points for the threat protocol which is now used to the standardised IoT IP communication, so there could be connections with other Working Groups to create new activities. Also, I think Maarten's talk was very, very interesting in analysing, maybe we can collaborate more closely with other organisations, like the IGF or the IOTF so from my side it's a question to you being here, also to the members of the Working Group, if you have any ideas, any input, what you think we could do better in the future? Okay.
Well, I mean, it is what it is. I just wanted to raise that topic ‑‑ oh, yes.
PETER KOCH: From DENIC. I agree with your assessment, basically, and all the suggestions and finding the connections to other groups inside and outside the RIPE community, like what's going in the IGF or in the IETF and we have had examples of that. I don't think though that fiddling with the charter is at this point going to help. The charter is broad, which is okay, we would have to narrow it down were we struck with a load of proposals that you would have to fend off, that's not the case. Focus on initiative ‑‑ focus and initiative can come within the charter and even if it's as broad as it is we can pick things and work on those. In the history of like the ‑‑ like the founding history of the Working Group there was, for example, the work that is going on or was started in the ITU study group 20, for example, that would be interesting to learn about in this venue and also as we learned in other sessions two days before, giving operator input to protocol development is one thing, the other is that we have lots of operators experienced with IP and IP, like ITF suite protocols. Lots of the protocol development happening in completely other venues and I think it would be important to connect the two and this could be one possible venue to start this which you already did with the first presentation, I think, so that is, in my opinion, it's a good start, just follow the crowd ‑‑ follow it out without losing the confidence in the charter, that is okay, just keep on that work, thank you.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you very much, Peter.
JIM REID: I am going to start by saying as I agree with pretty much everything Peter has just said and Peter I have a running joke we really agree with anything so that's rather remarkable.
I think it's good to have these bit of discussions about where this Working Group is headed, what it should be doing and what people think might be useful so I think it's helpful to have conversations, but I don't think we should be overly concerned about that, the fact that the Working Group mailing list is relatively quiet, there's been not much in terms of activity after the BCOP is published, that's okay, I wouldn't worry about this, if you look at some of the other RIPE Working Groups their traffic isn't high either on the mail lists, they don't produce documents, it's not necessarily a failure of the Working Group and we shouldn't be too concerned about it. The fact there are so many people tells you the Working Group is serving a useful purpose so let's not forget that and as Peter rightly pointed out, I think probably one of the good things about the Working Group it can serve as a focus to get details of what's going on in other fora, what is going on, what's being discussed inside government and regulatory fora, these are useful and we can act as the information exchange for that and it's too hard for people to try and keep traffic of what is going on in all these places and it means anything to anybody, adds to the whole notion of vagueness and fussiness. I wouldn't be too concerned about that.
We shouldn't be trying to think what's ‑ the charter, as soon as that rings alarm bells, we are just doing inward looking navel‑gazing and when the Working Group was started, the chatter was designed to be intentionally vague, the whole purpose was well we don't know IoT might develop or how things might come along in the future so let's leave things as open as possible in order to accommodate how this scenario might unfold, so I wouldn't worry about the fact that the charter is too vague and I don't think changing it will improve the amount of traffic we get in the mailing list or the number of documents we produce, so I don't think that's really necessarily a solution to the problem. If we think there's even a problem there and to my mind I don't think there's a problem. Thank you.
NIALL O'REILLY: Niall O'Reilly, RIPE vice‑chair. I don't want to contradict anything that Peter or Jim have said, especially since they are in agreement, but I would add a little thing, different Working Groups have from time to time different focuses and within the existing charter any of those focuses could be a next good one or a number of parallel next good ones for this Working Group, I am thinking of the information exchange idea that Jim mentioned, the kind of capacity building approach that we see in the DNS Working Group, there might be specific policy window things such as Maarten was talking to us about earlier, so as I said, don't necessarily focus on the charter but find something interesting to do, I think the charter is broad enough that ‑‑ our find one or two things interesting to do but choose what you'd like to do between this and the next or the after next RIPE meeting and I'm sure the charter is broad enough to fit it.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you very much, Niall. I totally agree. So thank you very much for your input. When reading the charter there was I think an interesting point, we can also work on, because there is a point to serve as a focal point for the RIPE NCC regarding community input and I think this is not a one‑way road. I think in the past we had at the Working Group sessions also a RIPE NCC undate with interesting developments, what's going on on the regulatory side, etc., so this exchange might also help us to also better serve the community.
JIM REID: Yeah, good point,Peter, we have to remember that this was the reason the IoT Working Group was originally formed, because NCC staff being asked questions and things like the round table meetings, what does the community or does the RIPE NCC think about IoT this or IoT that, and they didn't have any kind of mechanism to consult with the community and get views and be able to represent those views in those meetings and stuff like that. So the fact that the Working Group exists gives the chance for the community across the RIPE region to be able to come together, express, voice, view and give some guidance to the NCC when they have to make those cases or those presentations, for example in EU meetings or whatever so that's another reason for the continued work of the Working Group as it is at the moment, remember we are not trying to discuss and make information about what is happening in the IoT world but to help the IOC when they are playing the politics stuff.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you, Jim, thank you so much.
Yeah, I think that was great input, so I think it will help us a lot moving forward.
Let's ‑‑ oh, come to the last point, we are slightly over time, but this is also important. So, as I already mentioned so Sandoche's term as a co‑chair is ending with this RIPE meeting. First of all, I really want to thank Sandoche from my heart for the work he was doing over those years for the community for this Working Group. Amazing job. Thank you so much Sandoche. Thank you.
(Applause)
SANDOCHE BALAKRICHENAN: I would like to say a few words here. So, I would love to be there but due to some personal emergency I had to go back to India so the last four years has been an exciting journey for me, I have learned a lot of things, I would love to thank the community, especially my current co‑chair Peter and previous co‑chairs that I worked with Jim Reid and Constanze. I would also like to thank RIPE NCC for the support and I hope to see you around hopefully in the next RIPE meetings, thank you.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you so much, Sandoche.
(Applause)
Okay, so fortunately the last point on my slide is wrong at the last minute Peter Vale has stepped up and asked to become a co‑chair of the IoT Working Group so he is quite new in RIPE, so I think he will appreciate our support. And,Peter, maybe you want to say a few words about yourself.
Peter Wehrle: Peter Zet engineering so that is about electronics, digital signalling processing, while my professional is on the IT of business applications so I had various companies in the telecommunication industry and the business apart systems and the passion for the IoT comes from hobby so I am a radio amateur and so we have to connect the generations, so that is ‑‑ there's the one side where you have the radio signals, all the experience there about antenna, how it will get signals through and the other side you have the young kids, have hand helds or more about rasberry PI, decoding centres while you come to electronics, how to save energy, so that's a lot of combinations and I am running exhibition once a year in Germany where we put this together more and more so the radio amateurs and makers to do a lot of projects and there's a lot of common things on the IoT and I just looked up, so nobody wants to step up for IoT so I found an appreciation right now and from my side I looked up so there are more double time IoT devices around that humans on earth so it can't be unimportant subject so that is a base. Whenever you look for smart resource consumption, you have your car and you try to match energy generation and consumption together maybe with your heating at home, so you optimise resources, we have the resources we have today, we have to be very careful to optimise them and whatever you have as a smart idea you need to have data from the environment, you put it together and that is my passion which I bring in, so I am not a from a professional background on any IoT companies but I am happy to start a networking and to bring some new spirit into that from the hobby and to put together telecoms electronic and all the stuff.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you very much, Peter. Greatly appreciated.
(Applause)
PETER STEINHAUSER: And I think passion is the best thing you can bring as a co‑chair and member of this Working Group. So, welcome,Peter, as the new co‑chair of the Working Group, I will do my best to support you.
Peter: I have heard a few people have not subscribed, please subscribe, you can go via the main page and subscribe to the mailing list and stay in contact and we find also some sweet spots where we are interested in and get the exchange running.
PETER STEINHAUSER: Thank you very much.
Well, this brings us to the end of our session. First of all, I want to thank our scribe, as always doing a great job here, also want to thank the team from the RIPE NCC which make the technology happen and fixed everything in the last minute. And of course all the attendees, your input and, yeah, hopefully seeing all of you on RIPE 87. Thank you so much.
(Applause)
