Demonstration experiment to substantially reduce communications traffic from IoT devices to cloud environment is started by NEC, the University of Tokyo, NTT, and Waseda University

In the middle of December 2018, NEC Corporation (Note 1, hereafter referred to as NEC), Nakao Laboratory, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, National University Corporation, the University of Tokyo (Note 2, hereafter referred to as the University of Tokyo), Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (Note 3, hereafter referred to as NTT), and Educational Corporation, Waseda University (Note 4, hereafter referred to as Waseda University) jointly started in the Chugoku region to develop a common IoT platform to implement a demonstration experiment concerning the protection of high-priority communications between IoT devices and the cloud environment.
Specifically, in the demonstration experiment, information collected from river level and rainfall sensors is monitored to allow forecasting of river overflow. What is intended to demonstrate is that the network traffic can be reduced by means of IoT gateway (Note 5), which, instead of cloud environment, performs the functionality of data processing applications, depending on urgency and importance of data. Utilizing various sensors and IoT gateway installed in the Chugoku region, cloud environment installed in the Yokohama Research Park (YRP), and a large-scale sensor/cloud infrastructure test-bed (JOSE) operated by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), the technological effectiveness will be evaluated during the period from the middle of December 2018 to the middle of February 2019.
The four parties have been investigating common IoT platform technologies, which allow effective, optimum, and dynamic utilization of network, and their specific applications. According to a provisional calculation at the moment, it is expected that about 90 percent of communications traffic can be reduced. This demonstration experiment is part of the verification of the effects of the platform, and the achievements of this demonstration experiment will be the achievements of the project, "Establishment and demonstration of common IoT platform technologies," the contract research sponsored by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
In the future, the four parties will cope with this research and development until March 2019, and will contribute to the development of solutions and services, which utilize IoT and of which demand is expected to increase.