Jio showcases enablement of secure IoT over Blockchain platform

Who: Jio Platforms

What: Developed an integrated suite for IoT platform with Blockchain in-house, giving massive IoT ecosystems a secure means of onboarding and delivering end-to-end use cases

How: Aligned the platform’s design with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs to foster collaborative innovation between enterprises and IoT device makers for the creation of new services.

Results: Based on extensive trials, Jio Platforms expects at least: 100% acceleration in adoption of cellular IoT devices; four-fold reduction in time to market for IoT enterprises; 100% increase in telco revenues beyond connectivity; 100% enhanced customers’ trust due to blockchain-enabled security; 75% increase in efficiency with transformed information system architecture.

Industries are embracing IoT for smart homes, surveillance drones, driverless cars, trains, vehicle platoons and many more applications. Communications service providers (CSPs) have a huge role to play beyond the obvious one of providing wireless and wireline connectivity for ecosystems of devices and machine-to-machine communications (M2M) players.

The networks they provide must be secured by encryption to protect anonymity and be tamper proof to reduce the perceived threat to operational assets, transaction attributes, and users’ data flowing between machines or machines and the network. At the same time, IoT ecosystems are predicted to grow exponentially, with billions of eSIM devices coming online that can act autonomously. A secure means of onboarding and delivering end-to-end services is critical.

To meet these needs, Jio Platforms developed and built the Jio IoT Platform from scratch as an integral part of its wider Jio IoT Solution, shown below.

The Jio IoT Platform has embedded Blockchain technology and is aligned with with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA). The ODA is a blueprint for modular, cloud-based, open digital platforms that can be orchestrated using AI. Using the ODA as a reference architecture was important to ensure the platform achieved its aim of fostering collaborative innovation between enterprises and the IoT device ecosystem. For example, enabling the rapid creation of B2B2X and B2C business and operational models between multiple partners.

The platform uses Jio’s pan-Indian network with 99.999% assured availability to help enterprises penetrate deeper into markets through superior customer experience. It manages SIM and device lifecycles, leaving partners free to focus on their top line while removing expense from the bottom line: Partners don’t have to bear the costs of building up different businesses or operational support for information systems.

As shown in the diagram above, customers’ options include billing as a service – for instance, to support B2C models at low cost.

Jio IoT Platform manages connectivity

Jio’s platform is designed with a highly scalable architecture so that third-party applications can easily be integrated. The IoT platform is agnostic regarding use cases and access technologies (LTE, NB-IoT and, soon, 5G New Radio), with an Open API catalog that covers the key areas of device management, service diagnostics, security and reporting suites.

The suite of northbound and southbound APIs covers customer and device order fulfillment through provisioning and activation workflows. The Jio IoT platform has a multi-protocol architecture to support various IoT device protocols like MQTT, COAP, NIDD, LwM2M and more. This gives device manufacturers and M2M players flexibility to explore and evaluate the sustainability of use cases.

Jio’s Fulfillment Management System (Jio FMS) is integrated with the IoT platform, and can bulk provision SIMs that have been ordered across all related telecom network nodes.

Jio’s ATOM Platform

The ATOM platform also complements the Jio IoT Platform by enabling enterprises to run batch jobs, look in real time at device states, perform event and device data analysis and implement machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection and other purposes. The platform can ingest, process and store hundreds of petabytes of data.

The ATOM Platform’s big data lake can be exploited by the Jio IoT Platform to gain actionable intelligence based on rules defined by users. IoT device companies can conduct conformance testing of devices for particular use cases, which is essential in hardware engineering design for the manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) cycle. This saves hardware re-spinning costs and reduces time to market.

Blockchain for device onboarding, user anonymity

Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) provides assurance, trust and reliability to any business application using smart contracts and consensus techniques. The techniques enable enterprises to connect and integrate business modules together. Various IoT devices and sensors can be integrated with the blockchain system to leverage the immutability and trust assurance that DLT provides.

As shown below, the private key is generated using factory setting for every IoT sensor. During the onboarding process, this key is used to create a digital identity (also known as a digital certificate) for the sensor using public key infrastructure whereby a valid certificate authority issues a digital identity having received a certificate-signing request.

Sensors and other devices are configured to connect them to an enterprise application which collects data from them and pushes it to the Jio IoT platform. The Jio IoT Platform connects to the DLT system which stores the now immutable information for future communications using smart contracts. This information can be used by different data analysis tool to create data models for machine learning: The AI technology uses data models to predict or detect unusual patterns in sensors’ readings.

Governance, traceability, and audits

Private Blockchain technology enables enterprises to adopt the IoT ecosystem with confidence. They can configure a Blockchain network to meet their requirements and information security guidelines. A well-defined governance model is used to ensure that any change in network configuration, such as endorsement of policy definitions or network topology, requires prior approvals and is traceable.

This creates a robust, traceable system through which the user can track all the required detail about an IoT sensor or device from the downtime of a sensor to the number of hours a sensor worked and transfer of ownership. Blockchain provides a 360-degree view of the IoT sensors it covers.

Results

After recent extensive trials with multiple enterprises, the company expects the Jio IoT Platform to deliver at least:

• 100% acceleration in adoption of cellular IoT devices.
• 75% increase in operational efficiency due to transformed information system architecture.
• Four-fold reduction in time to market as third-party device partners and applications can be easily integrated into the Jio IoT platform and leverage device management, bulk provisioning, and telco billing capabilities.
• Exponentially faster monetization for partners because they can rapidly generate B2B or B2B2X business models as a result of digital transformation, without having to invest in use case journeys, operational lifecycles and networking infrastructure.
• IoT use case qualification – utility companies that provide smart IoT solutions can securely transact data over NB-IoT networks to authorized agencies, with less pilfering and more transparency. As they can extend their ‘last mile’, IoT device companies can also increase topline revenues.
• 100% secure data flow to counter privacy and hacking concerns – the tamper-proof solution has digital security certificates to ensure 100% secure onboarding and device management for partners.
• 100% enhanced customer trust due to blockchain-enabled security.
• 100% increase in revenue for telcos from beyond connectivity – IT infrastructure and IoT analytics services