Oregon State University has joined the world’s technology leaders — including LG, Microsoft, and Qualcomm — to advance the collaborative development of the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT is a network of devices that exchange information — anything from smaller devices like watches to full-scale “smart cities.” IoT devices are almost too numerous to count, including light bulbs, air vents, watches, speakers, parking monitors and mirrors. The number of connected devices is predicted to increase by another 30 percent in 2016, according to Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company.

In order for all of these devices to connect and communicate seamlessly there needs to be a common underlying technology. OSU is part of the AllSeen Alliance, a coalition of over 200 companies and technical supporters that is developing standard interfaces for IoT projects.

OSU’s Center for Applied Systems and Software (CASS) became interested in IoT as a key technology for the student employees to master. CASS’s expertise in open source technologies — source code that is open to the public to improve and change — was the basis for the collaboration with the Alliance. The Alliance’s primary software that allows devices and apps to communicate with one another is an open-source framework called AllJoyn.

CASS now hosts the Alliance’s AllJoyn Automated Test Suite (AJATS), a collection of hardware on which members run tests for AllJoyn. Because the Alliance is based on open-source development, the OSU’s Open Source Lab (a branch of CASS) proved an ideal neutral location for all the Alliance’s corporate engineers to monitor changes to the code and their impact on the devices.

In addition, the CASS test lab will verify that AllJoyn functions correctly before each quarterly release cycle. Between release cycles, the test lab practices to adjust to new tools and requirements. This project provides the student employees the opportunity to work with cutting edge software which will be deployed to millions of devices.