On 08.01.2017 22:32, Peter Saint-Andre - Filament wrote:
I haven't yet made time to deeply review and post at length about the IoT XEPs. However, I've looked at them all briefly and I have a high-level question about their focus and intent. Several of them mention use cases involving millions of devices on an IoT network, and even millions of devices behind a single JID acting as a concentrator. Do we truly think this is a realistic scenario? Most of the use cases I hear about from customers (not involving XMPP) as well as the real-world usage of XMPP I know about (e.g., in demand-response systems) involve perhaps a few hundred edge devices (sensors, actuators, and the like) at any given deployment (e.g., at a factory, office complex, oil refinery, or construction site). Personally I do not see a need for millions of endpoints behind a single concentrator JID. I don't think I even see a need for millions of endpoints on any single customer deployment - tens of thousands seems a lot more plausible.
Does it matter whether there are tens of thousands or millions of devices? What's important is that an IoT protocol has the ability to (optionally) represent multiple devices behind a single XMPP address, because that's an important use case. Consider of a thing with multiple sensors/actors (aka. nodes/devices). Besides the default permission model where a friend of the thing is able to control every actor and to read out every sensor of the device, you may want to give only certain entities access to certain nodes. But I don't see how the number of nodes is relevant here. - Florian