Abbreviation | OCF |
---|---|
Formation | February 19, 2016 |
Type | Standards organization |
Purpose | Promoting standards for the Internet of things |
Membership | Many member organizations [1] |
Website | openconnectivity |
The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is an industry organization to develop standards, promote a set of interoperability guidelines, and provide a certification program for devices involved in the Internet of things (IoT). By 2016 it claimed to be one of the biggest industrial connectivity standards organizations for IoT. [2] Its membership includes Samsung Electronics, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Electrolux. [3] [4] [1]
The OCF delivers a framework that enables these requirements via a specification, [5] [6] a reference implementation [7] and a certification program. IoTivity, the open source reference implementation of the specifications, is actively developed by different members of the OCF.
The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) began as an industry group to develop standards and certification for devices involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) based around the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). [8] OIC was created in July 2014 by Intel, Broadcom, and Samsung Electronics. [9] Broadcom left the consortium shortly after it was established, due to a disagreement on how to handle intellectual property. [10]
In September 2015 a release candidate of the specification in version 1.0 for the core framework, smart home device, resource type, security and remote access capabilities was released. [11] By November, 2015, "diamond members" included Cisco Systems, GE Software, Intel and Samsung. [12]
On February 19, 2016 the OIC changed its name to the Open Connectivity Foundation and added Microsoft, Qualcomm and Electrolux. [13]
In November 2018 it was announced version 1 of the standard was ratified by International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 30118-1:2018. [14]
In November, 2019, OCF released a draft "cloud API" for cloud computing services in addition to device-to-device and device-to-cloud service specifications.
By 2021, "diamond members" were Haier, LG Corporation and Samsung. [15]
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols on the Internet Protocol (IP) that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices, to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the network and establish functional network services. UPnP is intended primarily for residential networks without enterprise-class devices.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is a specification that defines an architecture for the platform firmware used for booting a computer's hardware and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of firmware that implement the specification are AMI Aptio, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, InsydeH2O.
WS-Management is a DMTF open standard defining a SOAP-based protocol for the management of servers, devices, applications and various Web services. WS-Management provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the IT infrastructure.
Systech Corporation (Systech) is a California corporation founded in 1981 and headquartered in San Diego, California.
A Bluetooth stack is software that is an implementation of the Bluetooth protocol stack.
Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The Internet of things encompasses electronics, communication, and computer science engineering. "Internet of things" has been considered a misnomer because devices do not need to be connected to the public internet; they only need to be connected to a network and be individually addressable.
The Wireless Gigabit Alliance was a trade association that developed and promoted the adoption of multi-gigabit per second speed wireless communications technology "WiGig" operating over the unlicensed 60 GHz frequency band. The alliance was subsumed by the Wi-Fi Alliance in March 2013.
Wi-Fi Direct is a Wi-Fi standard for wireless connections that allows two devices to establish a direct Wi-Fi connection without an intermediary wireless access point, router, or Internet connection. Wi-Fi Direct is single-hop communication, rather than multi-hop communication like wireless ad hoc networks. The Wi-Fi Direct standard was specified in 2009.
Linaro is an engineering organization that works on free and open-source software such as the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), QEMU, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces for the ARM family of instruction sets and implementations thereof as well as for the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). The company provides a collaborative engineering forum for companies to share engineering resources and funding to solve common problems on ARM software. In addition to Linaro's collaborative engineering forum, Linaro also works with companies on a one-to-one basis through its Services division.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 1994 and involves more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards.
AllJoyn is an open source software framework that allows compatible devices and applications to find each other, communicate and collaborate across the boundaries of product category, platform, brand, and connection type. Originally the AllSeen Alliance promoted the project, from 2013 until 2016 when the alliance merged with the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). In 2018 the source code became hosted by GitHub.
Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products. The Thread protocol specification is available at no cost; however, this requires agreement and continued adherence to an end-user license agreement (EULA), which states "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."
The IoTivity is an open source framework created to standardize inter-device connections for the IoT. Any individual or company can contribute to the project, and this may influence OCF standards indirectly. However, being a member of the OCF can benefit from patent cross-licensing protection.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery. It uses the ideas and principles of open web standard development to create video standards that can serve as alternatives to the hitherto dominant standards of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
SensorThings API is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard providing an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web. It is an open standard addressing the syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability of the Internet of Things. It complements the existing IoT networking protocols such CoAP, MQTT, HTTP, 6LowPAN. While the above-mentioned IoT networking protocols are addressing the ability for different IoT systems to exchange information, OGC SensorThings API is addressing the ability for different IoT systems to use and understand the exchanged information. As an OGC standard, SensorThings API also allows easy integration into existing Spatial Data Infrastructures or Geographic Information Systems.
oneM2M is a global partnership project founded in 2012 and constituted by 8 of the world's leading ICT standards development organizations, notably: ARIB (Japan), ATIS, CCSA (China), ETSI (Europe), TIA (USA), TSDSI (India), TTA (Korea) and TTC (Japan). The goal of the organization is to create a global technical standard for interoperability concerning the architecture, API specifications, security and enrolment solutions for Machine-to-Machine and IoT technologies based on requirements contributed by its members.
The Gen-Z Consortium is a trade group of technology vendors involved in designing CPUs, random access memory, servers, storage, and accelerators. The goal was to design an open and royalty-free "memory-semantic" bus protocol, which is not limited by the memory controller of a CPU, to be used in either a switched fabric or a point-to-point device link on a standard connector.
Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open standard interconnect for high-speed, high capacity central processing unit (CPU)-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections, designed for high performance data center computers. CXL is built on the serial PCI Express (PCIe) physical and electrical interface and includes PCIe-based block input/output protocol (CXL.io) and new cache-coherent protocols for accessing system memory (CXL.cache) and device memory (CXL.mem). The serial communication and pooling capabilities allows CXL memory to overcome performance and socket packaging limitations of common DIMM memory when implementing high storage capacities.
EEBUS is a protocol suite for the Internet of things that aims to standardize the interface between electrical consumers, producers, storages, and (logical) managing entities. It builds on the Internet Protocol and related standards and is meant to be highly generic, cross-domain applicable, open, and free to the public. While its main area of application is the Energy demand management, data exchange, and control of appliances it is also specified for Home automation. A business logic is not specified by EEBUS. The EEBus Initiative e.V. is the non-profit association that manages and supports the standardization of EEBUS.
Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) is an open specification for a die-to-die interconnect and serial bus between chiplets. It is co-developed by AMD, Arm, ASE Group, Google Cloud, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC.