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In user identity management (Classic IdM) we have rather long living lifecycles of an identity. In day to day service like e-mail, online shopping etc. a user account exists for months, years or even a lifetime. We as users of any kind of service might ask ourselves “When was the last time when we actively deactivated or deleted an account?”. In the Internet of Things objects have very different lifetimes. This might range from years or decades down to days or minutes.
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In the IoT the last two proofs are not applicable to objects anymore.
How to find/address Things in the IoT? (DNS is not enough)
Various protocols
In the Internet of Things objects will be connected with different technologies and protocols. Many of the protocols are non-HTTP (Web)-based and some are even not IP-based. As a consequence not all objects in the Internet of Things have an IP-address. Different protocols use different kind of identifiers.
The drawback of hardware addresses for routing purpose
Even in case devices have an IP-based address it is not a good idea to code this address hard in an Application. The device or its interface might change and then all the software has to be corrected. That’s why usually a hardware address is mapped to a domain specific identifier.
For example:
A heater control software will rather access www.example-weather.com instead of 164.12.34.56. That’s due to the fact that the weather forecast service might change his hosting service or simply move to another server infrastructure. In this case the IP address might change from 164.12.34.56 to 146.65.78.123. Thanks to a mapping service the domain name www.example-weather.com will stay the same. A mapping service (here the Domain Name Service DNS) could be configured to provide the new IP-address for the same domain name. So the software will still work with the domain name while it will fail by using directly the IP address.
What’s the problem?
The weather forecast service in our example has a dedicated domain identifier according to the IETF RFC 1738 called universal resource identifier (URI). Many devices in the IoT don’t have such an identifier others do not have an IP-address. That’s why the classic domain name service (DNS) is not sufficient for the Internet of Tings.
Object Identifiers in the IoT
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