Tizen and the Internet of Things

The third annual Tizen Developer Conference was held in San Francisco June 2–4. As in previous years, the program included a lot of updates about the direction the platform itself is heading and practical sessions for application developers. But this year also introduced a new motto for the project, "The OS of Everything." The slogan is an allusion to Tizen's goal of being a Linux platform for a wide variety of consumer devices, and there were a lot of devices on hand (cars, phones, TVs, watches, and cameras). It takes on a different tenor, however, when it is used in conjunction with the Internet of Things (IoT) concept—which several of the speakers addressed.

Like "the cloud," IoT can mean several different things to various groups of people, but some of those people make the argument that connected devices as they currently exist are a fragmented field of single-vendor products. Linux and open-source software clearly has an important role to play in parts of the IoT space, and the Tizen project seems to be positioning itself to be the go-to Linux distribution for manufacturers.

Mark Bryan of the home-automation company iControl first raised the IoT topic in his keynote address. As one would expect from a home-automation vendor, Bryan's perspective on IoT focused on connected appliances, lights, door locks, and similar household features. At present, he said, the marketplace for these products is a mishmash of single-vendor products like the Nest thermostat and isolated services, like those from house-alarm providers and some cable companies. Since there is evidently considerable interest in "smart homes" and all of the individual pieces (open networking standards, inexpensive processors, low-power chipsets) are available, he said, the question becomes: where is the friction that prevents this type of IoT from taking off?

Bryan argued that the main point of friction is that all of the smart-home product vendors are still building their own operating system stack from scratch: from the kernel right up to the application layer. His company, he said, has seen this occur multiple times as they are contracted to develop smart-home software. The result is one-off products that are quickly orphaned. When each device offers a unique API, application developers tend to give up quickly, and there is rarely (if ever) any interoperability.

As an experiment, iControl recently decided to write a home-control app for Samsung's Tizen-powered Gear2 smartwatch. The app includes monitoring and management for a wide variety of home systems: illumination, alarms, door locks, appliances, and thermostat. It completed the project in just two weeks, easily surpassing expectations. Subsequently, he said, he has come to think that a common Linux platform used by multiple vendors is what IoT will eventually adopt, and he thinks Tizen is the best choice.

Of course, home automation is not the only possible meaning of IoT. In a later breakout session, Joe Speed from the Allseen Alliance raised that point specifically. The home automation scenarios Bryan described typically revolve around relaying a status update or a command between a smartphone (or, in the Gear2 case, a smartwatch) and a connected appliance that has little or no built-in user interface. Such systems tend to use remote servers (and "the cloud") to communicate—and not just to smartphone apps. Instead, they also involve sending data back to power companies and other service providers.

But, he said, there is a second, completely different meaning of IoT that focuses on direct, peer-to-peer messaging between the devices themselves—or, as he put it, "proximal" communication. While HTTP tends to be the protocol of choice for relaying information from an appliance to a remote server, he said, it is unsuitable for proximal connections, especially between resource-constrained devices like sensors.

Speed's own background prior to joining Allseen was in automotive computing, which he pointed out was part of the IoT landscape even if it is rarely characterized as such: "a car is a thing," he pointed out. Connected cars can generate an average of 5GB of sensor data per hour on the road, he said, which is prohibitively large for an HTTP transport mechanism. Instead, the project he was on investigated the compact MQTT (for "for MQ Telemetry Transport") protocol, which features a publish/subscribe model and a lightweight message format.

Most recently, MQTT has been used by Local Motors for its Tizen-powered "Rally Fighter" connected car. It results in about 93 times the throughput of HTTP (while still running over TCP/IP), he said, and just as importantly, it can be used in road sensors and other embedded devices with very little power. The automotive industry is eyeing it for "next-generation telematics," so that (for example) multiple cars on a stretch of road all using their antilock brakes would be recognized as an indicator of some dangerous condition (such as ice), a fact that could then be relayed to other approaching vehicles.

Speed showed a demonstration of the Rally Fighter's remote connectivity by using his phone to activate the headlights, blinkers, and windshield wipers of a car sitting at a different conference venue in Florida. A coworker provided a live video feed of car responding to the phone's commands.

There were several other talks over the course of the conference that dealt with IoT and Tizen but, like Speed's and Bryan's, they generally focused on what would be possible further down the line and offered standalone engineering samples and experiments as demonstrations. There is a compelling-sounding case to be made for many of the IoT scenarios—after all, most of them start with automating some everyday process or problem (such as noticing that the refrigerator needs a new water filter).

But Tizen is just beginning to branch out into the IoT space; there is still quite a bit of work to be done persuading device makers to adopt Tizen as their base Linux distribution. In the event's first keynote address, Intel's Imad Sousou set out a rough roadmap for the project. At present, he said, the project is supporting three classes of device: automotive, smartphones, and wearable devices (i.e., smartwatches). In the next few months, three more will be added: televisions, cameras, and home appliances. Samsung's J.D. Choi also addressed IoT is his keynote talk, announcing that Tizen would be participating in a new "Open Smart Home" project and a related W3C group to define HTML5 APIs for connected appliances.

That represents an ambitious goal for a project as young as Tizen is; TDC is in its third year, and this is the first event at which there were consumer devices on display that are already available for purchase: the Gear2 watch and NX300M camera (which is a Samsung product, even though when it was launched "camera" was not one of Tizen's official device profiles). Samsung announced more devices—the Samsung Z smartphone and an as-yet unnamed family of smart TVs—which was big news for the project.

But IoT may be a trickier device class to support; as Bryan and Speed illustrated, it encompasses a much wider array of hardware performing a less-well-defined set of operations. Perhaps IoT is still in the early stages of defining itself; if so, then Tizen could either be instrumental in helping industry players figure out the way forward, or it may have a hard time meeting the needs of such a diverse assortment of products. Time, as always, will tell.

[The author would like to thank the Tizen Association for travel assistance to attend TDC 2014.]