“Some aspects of IoT will need blockchains, plural. Not “the blockchain”, but a wide variety of private blockchains / distributed ledgers for a wide variety of different purposes.
Remember, there is no singular “I” in IoT. It’s 1000s of separate, non-interconnected networks.”
Dean Bubley.
With millions of sensors running around collecting data and communicating autonomously, often with in “chatty” mode, IoT is going to generate a huge number of transactions (probably already is!). Blockchain techniques appear to be well suited to handling the automated (smart) contracts and micro-payments across these Internet(s) of Things – basically to keep a ledger on those transactions and the implications of them. [Aside: To pose a somewhat tongue-in-cheek question, if you have a blockchain hammer, does every situation start to look like a nail? I’m sure blockchain will have a place in the world of IoT though].
So the next question is where does OSS fit in within this framework? Can OSS / BSS become the manager of (IoT) managers? Do IoT managers just become another NMS / EMS class for OSS to manage? Do their existing ability to coordinate orders, activities, analytics (with their potential to drive feedback loops), billing, assurance, orchestration, multi-tenancy, contracts (and contract management via SLAs), etc mean that all the building blocks are already in place to manage a multi-IoT environment? Do existing standards such as SID, eTOM, GB942, provide an existing framework of terminology?
I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I assume the evolution of multi-IoT networks is too nascent, but I would love to hear from anyone who is doing anything in this space.