The device communications engineering committee, also known as TR-50, aims to produce in short order a protocol for communicating with smart devices used in industries such as manufacturing, medical, building automation/home automation, transportation, entertainment, semiconductor, communication, and energy distribution.

 

"While other protocols may accommodate accessing subsets of the information and events, no other organization addresses common requirements and interoperability of essential intelligent/smart devices across industries," says Charles Kenmore, TIA (News - Alert) board member and chairman of its standards and technical committee.

 

Looking to leverage work already done by other groups, the committee will consider many possible use cases that include monitoring, as well as remote changing of state (both read and write functions). Types of information and events that any smart devices communications specification needs to accommodate, according to TIA, include equipment fault events, preventive maintenance events, energy metrics, network metrics, equipment data (customizable) and remote diagnostics and configuration management.

 

Companies that have expressed interest in supporting this initiative, according to TIA, include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson Inc., Intel Corp., ILS Technology, LGE, Motorola, Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks, Qualcomm, Telcordia Technologies, Tyco Electronics, Verari Systems and Ygomi.