The ITU is coordinating standardisation efforts on IoT technologies for smart cities

The ITU has set up a working group to help set out standardisation requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in smart cities deployments. The ITU said the next five years will be crucial for IoT standards development.

The new ITU-T Study Group for “IoT and its applications, including smart cities and communities” will help coordinate international standards development on the use of IoT and M2M technologies to address urban development challenges.

The organisation said it is “well positioned” to help governments and the private sector capitalise on the potential for IoT to transform city infrastructure through smart buildings, transportation systems modernisation, smart energy and water networks.

ITU secretary-general Houlin Zhao said the new ITU-T Study Group, which will initially be hosted in Singapore, will bring together a diverse selection of stakeholders including ITU’s technical experts as well as national and metropolitan administrations responsible for urban development.

Chaesub Lee, director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said: “The coming five years will be crucial in ensuring that IoT technologies meet their potential. ITU-T is very active in IoT standardization, and we aim to assist cities around the world in creating the conditions necessary for IoT technologies to prove their worth in addressing urban-development challenges.”

Given the nascent state of IoT there are preciously few standards, and one of the benefits that could potentially emerge from developing them within the context of smart cities is that the number of systems requiring integration, and the diversity of their requirements, is significant. While this makes the task of securing consensus on standards more complex, it could make the standards generated more robust and widely applicable to a range of use cases.