The march of the IoT is going full steam ahead, and the next 1 trillion devices are expected to deliver up to 2.3 Zetabytes of data per month. These are mind-bobbling numbers.
By working together to achieve this vision, we need to create a world where sensors from billions and billions of devices will enable us to collect data about everything that is going on in the world. Sensors and data platforms combined with advances in machine learning and computing power (such as ARM’s recently launched DynamIQ) will enable us to solve global challenges in new ways, as the IoT combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the potential to change humanity in all areas - agriculture, energy and medicine just to name a few.
To get the IoT right, we have to start with the building blocks, and the most important key to IoT is security. This is a serious business, and the problem space is changing. Previously when we had the silos of ‘things’, you could just add security afterwards. But for IoT we need security built in, from the silicon up, not “bolted-on”.
The attack surface can come from not only the device itself, but the connectivity and communications as well as the cloud. All in all, a strong familiarity with foundational security architecture is needed.
ARM has worked with its partners to solve this problem in the past. Trustzone is the technology foundation that enables developers to create a range of secure services with the smartphone as a platform: You can securely log in to your banking app via your fingerprint for authentication because of the hardware features of Trustzone in the core of the smart devices we use. And now, as ARMv8-M architecture extended the proven TrustZone technology to the smallest devices for root of trust, with the latest members of the Cortex-M processor family based on the ARMv8-M architecture, Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33. it brought TrustZone security to even the smallest of embedded devices, which are to be the foundation for these billion of IoT devices.
To complement our new secure cores ARM have put together a complete suite of IP to enable our partners to build secure silicon platforms, quickly and effectively, which range from processors, physical IP, to crypto accelerators, and secure interconnect.
But security on silicon, for IoT, is nothing without connectivity. And this is the last part of the puzzle, perhaps most importantly, ARM Cordio radio IP, our Bluetooth 5 qualified Bluetooth low energy IP.
We’ve mentioned secure IoT platform, on silicon, and to complete the picture, all of this hardware IP is supported by a lot of software which is supported by our mbed offering for cloud and device.
Regarding Cordio, customers can choose ARM’s RF, or choose their own RFE or one that we don’t support (yet). This is enabled by a Radio front end interface (RFI) which enables interfacing to non-ARM RF front ends.
As Bluetooth low energy further expands to support IoT, we will see a lot of new applications with the mesh and long range enhancements in the near future. Its beacon (with the 4x extended length advertising in Bluetooth 5) supported in Cordio, provides for more device discovery and connecting us to services in the cloud.
But for Bluetooth low energy to expand beyond the current smartphone appcessory market, it will need a complimentary WAN technology. The recently released NarrowBand-IoT standard could provide a valuable role here with global coverage, with low-power low-data rate connectivity.
Taking for example 2 scenarios below, a smart parking meter, and a smart home. Bluetooth 5 can be the front technology, providing direct connectivity with end user, and mesh between each meters, whilst NB-IoT connectivity transfers data to/from the cloud via the infrastructure.
In the smart home, devices can communicate via Bluetooth low energy to an aggregator, which in turn communicates to the cloud services via NB-IoT.
On our booth at Bluetooth World 2017, we had a demo of this in action, showcasing Bluetooth low energy provides essential discovery of services for a parking meter, from Bluetooth low energy to the cloud (you can read more about this, in this blog from Charles Dittmer).
ARM is offering NB-IoT
So in addition to our Cordio Bluetooth solutions, we have announced the Cordio-N IP, a full solution for NB-IoT. In the same manner as the Cordio Bluetooth IP, it will offer a qualified solution from RF to Application software, all from ARM.
Cordio-N will provide the secure back-haul for Bluetooth low energy products, and a device to cloud solution that can scale beyond PAN to cover the future of IoT.
We’ve mentioned trillion devices. So how to solve the challenging problem of managing that many devices in a multi-cloud world? We are working with our partners, and mbed Cloud is a cloud platform that takes care of managing devices, including Connecting, Securing and Updating them – freeing up developers to focus on what they do best, which is to write the device and cloud applications, in any cloud environment they choose.
We have strong partnerships with all Cloud providers that our OEM customers use, and mbed Cloud is compatible with all Cloud environments. In our parking meter demo for example we use IBM Watson public block-chain.
Accelerating the route to secure IoT at scale cannot be addressed by easily available hardware alone. Secure hardware along with connectivity and trust are critical to unlock the full value of IoT, and the full ARM IP solution and ecosystem are key to solving this challenge.