The latest entrant to the already crowded field of players in the IoT standards game is the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPC), which has announced plans to develop a set of benchmarks for the performance of IoT hardware and software.
The TPC has set up a new working group, chaired by Raghunath Nambiar, a distinguished engineer at Cisco, “tasked with developing industry standard benchmarks for both hardware and software platforms associated with the Internet of Things (IoT).”
Its justification for the move is: “As the number of interconnected platforms continues to multiply, vendors and customers increasingly require an impartial means of comparing performance, cost-of-ownership and energy consumption across a widening array of hardware and software systems.”
The TPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. Benchmarks are its speciality and it has about a dozen active ones. It’s not at all clear at this stage just what will emerge from the TPC’s IoT benchmarking exercise, or when.
Nambiar was quoted in the TPC press release saying: “Analyst firm IDC predicts that the worldwide IoT market will grow to $1.7 trillion by the year 2020. To put that in perspective, only 16 economies in the world had gross domestic product exceeding $1 trillion in 2014. Formation of this Working Group is the first major step in bringing industry and the research community together – to develop a set of standardised workloads and metrics – which enable fair comparisons across technologies and products.”
Effective comparisons essential
In a post on Cisco’s blog site, he said: “As the IoT ecosystem evolves in the enterprises, it is eminent to have a set of standards that enable effective comparison of hardware and software systems and topologies in a technology and vendor-neutral manner.”
Given the breadth of technologies and applications that will be embraced under the umbrella term of IoT it seems likely that there will be multiple benchmarks and much work for the TPC.
The IoT benchmarks already have their own page on the TPC web site where the TPC invites “companies, research and government institutions who are interested in influencing the development of such benchmarks,” to join the organisation.
