The Telecommunications Industry Association’s (News - Alert) newly launched Smart Device Communications Engineering Committee (TR-50) met here last week, electing Jeff Smith, CTO at Numerex (News - Alert) Corp., as committee chairman, and Jim Wert, product manager of deviceWISE products at ILS Technology, as vice chairman.

 

TR-50 was established in December to develop standards to enable, monitor and ensure interoperable interfaces to the network. At last week’s meeting, representatives from more than 40 companies engaged in lively discussions about the scope, requirements, definitions and architecture of smart devices. U.S. government and trade association representatives also participated.

 

“As one of our objectives, we will promote throughout the work of the Smart Device Communications Committee TIA’s (News - Alert) core values: connectivity, innovation, leadership and responsibility,” Smith said.

 

 

In regards to his appointment, Wert said, “Having worked in standards development, I could not be more pleased with the speed and cooperative effort I see in TR-50. It’s evident by the level of participation and urgency that there’s a real need for the industry to come together on these important standards, which are critical for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. It’s satisfying to know that TIA can facilitate the process and effectively move the ball forward.”

 

At last week’s meeting, members of the recently formed committee also approved the following scope:

 

Engineering Committee TR-50 Smart Device Communications is responsible for the development and maintenance of access agnostic interface standards for the monitoring and bi-directional communication of events and information between smart devices and other devices, applications or networks. These standards development efforts pertain to but are not limited to the functional areas as noted:

 

Requirements

System Architecture

Cross-Industry Communication

Leverage Existing (and Future) Physical Infrastructure

Information Models (State Diagrams)

Security (e.g., Data Content, Mutual Authentication)

End to End Performance and Scalability of Equipment and Networks

Network Management/Operations

Device Management (including Discovery and Identity)

Protocols

Minimum Performance, Conformance and Interoperability Testing

 

The approved scope also notes that “TR-50 will develop a Smart Device Communications framework that can operate over different underlying transport networks (wireless, wired, etc.) and can be adapted to a given transport network by means of an adaptation/convergence layer. The TR-50 framework will make its functionality available to applications through a well-defined Application Programming Interface (API) that is agnostic to the vertical application domain (eHealth, Smart Grid, Industrial Automation, etc.).”

 

TR-50’s next meeting is scheduled for March 10-11 in Denver.