Elevating National-Level Collaborative Internet of Things (IoT) to Worldwide IoT Orchestration: Tackling Global Crises via IoT
Several nations have already started establishing national-level Internet of Things (IoT) platform, however some have not been fully deployed. Regardless, we are allowed to have a vision about how it can be modelled ideally and fitted for global purpose of saving the world via IoT automation.
National-Level Collaborative IoT Model
Saving the world begins with saving one-self first, hence the IoT deployment modelling would start from the national-level. The Figure 1 below is referred that visualizes high-level national collaboration.
At national level, parties involved in IoT collaboration could be modelled in hierarchical manner starting from the platform owner, which is likely to be one of the ministries. It would then resell the platform to the corporations that are capable to distribute IoT services in wide coverage throughout the country. This trait is normally possessed by telecommunication (a.k.a. telco) companies with their links of cellular towers. Subsequentially after a solid infrastructure foundation is laid, the coding part where all the necessary microservices would be installed may initiate. The telcos may assign this task to their own software engineers or outsource it to software companies specialized in building IoT services.
The outsourcing is the fun part, where the “cake” can be shared among enterprises. This is where IoT solution innovations could be solicited by engaging local talents — not necessarily through business contracts — but also via hackathons, collaborations with Universities, and whatnots. Further commercialization and/or reselling strategy may be devised at this stage by allowing the respective enterprises to sell their IoT solutions that piggyback on the government-owned IoT platform. The customers or end-users may then choose between subscribing to solutions provided by the telcos or the enterprises. Different IoT solutions or use cases may share data and be involved in an inter-vertical orchestration, which is depicted in Figure 2 below.
Exciting IoT actions could be triggered among use cases, for example, a sensor in a Smart Factory may detect that product manufacturing has been completed and thus sends this data to the Smart Fleet that would depart to the factory and pick up the finished goods for delivery. Another example is when fire sensor in a Smart House senses smoke and/or fire and forwards this condition to the alarm system in the fire department, which sequentially triggers the firemen to get on the fire truck to take off to the respective house.
The bad news is that issues may arise from inter-vertical orchestration, such as data ownership, data reselling, profit sharing ratio, leadership distribution, insurance payment sharing (customers may also be allocated payment portion), branding preposition (Which brand should be at the forefront? And which brand becomes the side-brand?), and other potentially unforeseen challenges.
Another major complexion is IoT pricing model; Should we bundle it with broadband packages? Should we charge customers based on data usage or frequency of IoT usage or fixed duration or selected features or whatnots? Should we involve blockchain-based Smart Contracts to facilitate trading of IoT services? Finding optimal and consistent pricing model may take trials and feedbacks from the customers.
Global IoT Orchestration
Now let’s escalate our capability to the ever-scalable context where saving the world via IoT orchestration could be at stake. Imagine an ideal world with IoT command centres spread across the globe that tackles international crises in real time as visualized in Figure 3 below. This is a utopian future with political burdens put aside.
An example of a crisis that may be solved is in oil and gas industry, where there could be pipe leakage that may lead to oil losses and financial turbulence. This incident may be accidental or intentionally done by criminals. We surely can detect pipe leakage, but assuming the host country does not have enough army to retaliate, then foreign army could be contacted for help. Suppose such incident occurs in Nigeria, where pipe leakage sensors would send alert and trigger an ally army in neighbouring country Chad to convey military aid.
Water security related crises are of utmost importance to be solved with IoT orchestration since people’s daily activities mostly involve water. Take a scenario where a farm in Somalia would suffer from a sudden halt of irrigation. Water sensors would then send alert to the neighbouring country Kenya, which would then trigger the opening of water gate aid to Somalia.
Another environmental crisis is forest fire, where countries with inadequate water supply may need aid to put out the fire. Brazil for example suffered from over 200,000 wildfires in 2022 alone. Fire sensors could be installed in strategic spots in the forests and fire alert would be sent to the neighbouring country Colombia, which would act upon it and dispatch water sprayer airplanes.
So far we have discussed about IoT rules and actions, but as the saying goes “Prevention is better than cure”, therefore preventive measures should also be considered. Nowadays, Augmented Reality (AR) applications have become a trend and lots of people have been developing new AR-based solutions to be implemented. Let’s bring a preventive AR-based application to train people and authorities to handle forest fire before it happens. This mobile-based or tablet-based application would project a digital fire onto a real forest using the camera along with animated sensors’ mechanism. And then the steps to contain the fire would be displayed on the device screen in the form of engaging animations. See Figure 4 below as an illustration.
Final Words
There are plenty other global crises that can be mitigated by IoT orchestration. Notice that we do not talk about pricing when it comes to international IoT-driven humanitarian aids, simply because we are proposing charity-based business model, where the aid is given for free, but there may be reciprocation — meaning that future reciprocal favour could be delivered to the previous aiding nation. Afterall, life is not all about money, it is also about having decent life values and being a hero for each other.
