One more semester of course work and finishing up the dissertation for my Computer Science doctoral degree. This would have been the normal sequence of things to come had I not postponed four Doctoral Research courses in the first year due to the overwhelming workload from my regular day job. I had a hard time determining the dissertation title and struggled to convince myself that the research topic for the dissertation is a sufficiently worthwhile endeavor to take and will indeed be adding to the existing body of knowledge at completion. What I deemed as novel and new that could be accomplished within the boundaries of my allotted time to obtain the degree and my technical capabilities did not exactly jump out or appear in my mind's eye not because I had no idea but too many ideas to sort out. It became apparent that I was all over the place starting with very ambitious research subjects to ambitious subjects and everything in between. Machine learning, Neural Networking, Cognitive Radio, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Self Organizing Networks (SON), Machine-to-Machine Communications and Internet-of-Things just to name a few. Indeed they are big glitzy topics that are relatively new and certainly full of problems to solve and gaps to pursue. After all, these technologies are not entirely foreign to me as an experienced telecommunications software and protocol engineer, with a strong penchant to stay in the cutting edge of technology career-wise and reflected by my interest in wired and wireless signaling standards and other networking and security domains, and so I thought. It took almost a year for me to realize that picking a topic and narrowing it down to the actual research item is no small feat. Neither did I fully comprehend that the main goal of doing this dissertation is to obtain the degree and nothing much else should take priority over that. Thanks to my professors who grilled me in grasping this reality and not to try building a castle in the sky or even think about building a castle in the sky.
The 2nd phase of my title-research period was focusing on Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) since these were the project areas that I was involved in at work and not without great interest in them. But what about them that I could nail down as research topic was a whole different matter. Two things stood out as I was digging into possible title candidates for research. One was how fragmented the M2M/IoT standardization bodies were which is typical for new emerging technologies. Second was how critical that an abstraction layer for the delivery of M2M/IoT services are to M2M/IoT service providers that support heterogeneous access networks and various industry and commercial applications. A common platform that allows sharing of IoT core services in the creation of vertical IoT applications; not at all a newfangled idea in the principle of software engineering but there was no mistaken that this had to be the very next new area to explore and perfect for this emerging technology.
The title of my dissertation was born under the name of "State-of-the-art Internet-of-Things Horizontal Service Platforms towards Standardization".
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