Letter from the Editor | IEEE Standards University

Emerging Technology and Its Applications Require New Standards

Let’s put aside the question whether Blockchain is a real technology or a passing fad – a hype. The ups and downs of your fortunes in Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies in the last couple of years may have clouded your views. Short-term or long-term success, or failure, of cryptocurrencies may depend on the success, or failure, of Blockchain, but it is important to recognize that Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) have far greater uses in wide-ranging applications.

One such use of Blockchain is as a key enabling technology of 5G applications. Prof. Chaudhry and Dr. Asad present their research to propose a Blockchain-based Network Slice and Resource Brokerage system to build an open, transparent, and fair 5G ecosystem. They explain the challenges of addressing the massive cooperation required among 5G devices and potential solutions using Blockchain.

Another application of Blockchain is in creating and maintaining decentralized electric grid (Smart Grid). In his article, Dr. Claudio Lima explains the emergence of, and the importance of, DLT Blockchain for the electric utility industry. He uses Open Blockchain Energy (OBE) Architecture Framework, an emerging standard, and associated reference model to classify and categorize application segments in the energy industry and shows that the concept extends well beyond the Smart Grid to the entire energy sector.

As the world becomes more connected, consumers and industries – and their respective application ecosystems – will inherently require interaction. As these applications create their own DLT blockchains, they will need interoperable solutions. Dr. Claudio Lima, an authority in DLT and Blockchain technology, brings us interesting challenges and the need for global interoperable standards.

Mr. Meloni from University of Cagliari, Italy uses Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) to demonstrate the need for consensus algorithms and different ways of achieving the consensus. He then goes on to present the work on the Real-time Onsite Operations Facilitation (ROOF) standard for technical and functional interoperability of federated IoT systems.

Clearly, the need for standards and interoperability in an emerging technology is even greater at this time to ensure smoother deployment and wider adoption in critical applications.

Are you working on building Blockchain applications? What standards do you use? What challenges do you have? Can they be solved by new standards? Would you like to discuss these topics with fellow engineers? Let us know if we can facilitate such discussions. We are all ears!

Happy Reading.

Enjoy!

PS: Publication of this issue has taken a little longer than the usual quarterly schedule. As you will notice, the format of the eZine is now in a magazine format. Please provide us feedback on this new format. We would love your suggestions on how we can improve the format to make it easier to read.

Yatin Trivedi

Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Standards Education eZine

Member, IEEE-SA Board of Governors

ytrivedi@ieee.org

Yatin Trivedi, Editor-in-Chief, is a member of the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors (BoG) and Standards Education Committee (SEC), and serves as vice-chair for Design Automation Standards Committee (DASC) under Computer Society. Yatin served as the Standards Board representative to IEEE Education Activities Board (EAB) from 2012 until 2017. He also serves as the Chairman on the Board of Directors of the IEEE-ISTO.

Yatin currently serves as Associate Vice President for semiconductor design services at Aricent Inc. Prior to his current assignment, Yatin served as Director of Strategic Marketing at Synopsys where he was responsible for corporate-wide technical standards strategy. In 1992, Yatin co-founded Seva Technologies as one of the early Design Services companies in Silicon Valley. He co-authored the first book on Verilog HDL in 1990 and was the Editor of IEEE Std 1364-1995™ and IEEE Std 1364-2001™. He also started, managed and taught courses in VLSI Design Engineering curriculum at UC Santa Cruz extension (1990-2001). Yatin started his career at AMD and also worked at Sun Microsystems.

Yatin received his B.E. (Hons) EEE from BITS, Pilani and M.S. Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of IEEE-HKN Honor Society.