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IoT

5G is paving the way for large-scale deployments of IoT applications with its Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) and Ultra-reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) capabilities.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is impacting nearly every industry, including agriculture, health and medicine, logistics, infrastructure, manufacturing, and many more. While there are obvious differences between these verticals, they have at least three things in common:

Sensors to measure
Telecommunications to transfer the measurements
Context to provide meaning

Without a functioning sensor, nothing can be measured. Without available communications, nothing is transmitted. Without of the ability to apply context, nothing is fully understood or acted upon. For the IoT to deliver true value – to the patient, to the city operations center, to the farmer, to the car manufacturer and so on – all three corners of the IoT triangle must function and work together.

IoT Service Assurance

Why is the concept of context important in IoT? Context layers on additional meaning, allowing you to glean critical insights from sensor data. Take for instance a patient suffering from a medical condition who is being monitored remotely. How should we respond when an increase in blood pressure is detected? Does it require intervention? It depends. Is it still within the limits of what is considered ‘normal’ for this patient? Was she hospitalized recently? How many times has this happened in the past week? Does she take other medications?

The list of contextual data that affects a response can be long and varied. We need to have the right tools in place to collect and analyze all this information if we want to provide value.

Helix Service Assurance

The process of deriving value from sensor data and context involves the application of sophisticated analytic functionalities that can include Machine Learning and AI algorithms, applied to correlation and root cause analysis, trending and forecasting, and outlier analysis. The ultimate step in creating real value lies in closing the ‘action’ loop – either automatically, manually, or a combination of both.

Helix, TEOCO’s service assurance solution, addresses these challenges and tames the sensor data and context ‘beast’ with carrier-grade quality and scalability.

Helix delivers a number of critical capabilities for successful assurance of an IoT ecosystem:

Provides extensive monitoring and contextual analysis on data from multiple sensors across different domains and verticals.
Monitors and assures the communication network linking the sensors to the analytic processing resources (at the edge, core, and cloud). This can be extremely important in critical IoT use cases like remote surgery, robotics, connected cars, drones, and more.
Correlates between multiple data types and sources (for instance air pollution, traffic and weather, energy consumption, occupancy, ventilation and illumination).
Supports standard APIs to easily connect to other systems that are part of the ecosystem – such as sensors, gateways, communication devices and more.
Includes an internal configuration data base to store contextual data and metadata for enriching information displays (reports, dashboards, event screens, scorecards, geo map displays, etc.)

Action and Reaction

For an IoT project to succeed, your organization must be able to adapt to a new set of processes and tools. The Helix solution includes a policy and automation framework that helps with streamlining the business and operational processes required to extract and implement the value and efficiencies provided by IoT.

Learn more about Helix Service Assurance