June 2025 - In this interview, Abhijan Bhattacharyya (AB) of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a representative in global Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), discusses his involvement in standardizing future networks and IoT domains.
He also discusses the wider prospects for India to influence technology standardization globally. These opportunities stem from government initiatives aimed at harnessing the potential of India’s technology sector, as well as the growing business demand for IoT and Industry 4.0 facilitated by 5G and beyond. TCS is poised to seize these opportunities, showcasing a strong commitment to shaping future technologies and supporting government initiatives.
Q: Would you begin with by introducing yourself and your activities in the IoT arena?
AB: I joined TCS as a fresh engineering graduate over 21 years ago. Within a few months, I was assigned to a project for a UK based customer who is a globally recognized leader in building telecom test and measurement devices. There, I was responsible for delivering real-time signal processing codes for physical layer development based on 3GPP specifications. Within a short period of time, I took on the position of technical expert and became the project lead representing TCS in the customer office in the UK. During this time, I managed a sizable team of TCS engineers working on multiple wireless standards spread across the UK and India.
Around 2011, I switched from client facing assignments to working in TCS’ corporate research division. There was also a paradigm shift in my domain of work because I started to focus on the IoT protocol stack. Specifically, I concentrated on addressing the challenges arising from resource constraints in IoT communications. As a researcher I contributed to several publications, developed intellectual property, and participated in IETF standards related to IoT. My team and I succeeded in converting one of our contributions into an IETF RFC for enhancing the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).
At present, I hold the role of Senior Scientist in TCS. I look after standards driven research with a focus on contributing to different global standardization activities related to networks and network-based solutions for IMT 2020 and beyond.
Q: TCS being a large organization, would you add a bit more detail about your business unit and its activities?
AB: I belong to the “5G Solutions” team under the Network Solutions and Services (NSS) business unit. The team’s primary objective is to help enterprises transform their business through end-to-end solutions built on 5G and beyond technologies.
We serve the critical role of end-to-end system designers and integrators. This includes building robust next-gen networks, with cloud and AI-ML integration, along with the end-business solution. Our offerings extend from transforming communication service providers (CSPs) for future generations niche Industry 4.0/ 5.0 applications involving technologies such as cloud-native robotics and IoT, among many others. We combine our network capabilities with the TCS Connected Universe Platform to provide a holistic cloud native infrastructure. Our business unit has played a pivotal role in transforming India’s telecom connectivity along with national operator BSNL.
In parallel, we have an active role in nurturing and enhancing TCS’ contributions to national and global SDOs like TSDSI, ITU-T, 3GPP, oneM2M, IETF, etc. We have also assumed leadership roles in different SDOs. For example, I am the vice chair of ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG 13) on Future Networks and Emerging Network Technologies. The ITU-T SG13 addresses the requirements, architecture, functional capabilities, and application programming interfaces of converged future networks.
I am also a vice chair of the Study Group on Services & Solutions (SGSS) WG2 at the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI). TSDSI is an SDO that develops and promotes India specific requirements and standardizing solutions. The SGSS is the study group that deals with software and systems on future networks. The WG2 in SGSS deals specifically with vertical applications.
Q: How do you see network deployment evolving in India in the 5G era, and what does that imply for business transformation and the IoT?
AB: India embraced 5G relatively early compared to many other countries, which is a strong competitive signal. However, the true non-standalone form of 5G has not yet penetrated the Indian telecom market, which remains predominantly focused on mobile consumers.
Looking ahead, the success of future telecom technologies will be essentially driven by vertical-specific business requirements. There is an increasing realization that the return on investment (RoI) is no longer related to the amount of data being consumed. Instead, it depends on the value of the service being enjoyed by end users. We see this effect in different ways. For example, discussions at national forums like Bharat 6G Alliance and TSDSI are actively exploring how to align future technologies to actual requirements of end stakeholders. At the Government level, there are practical initiatives in terms of smart villages, smart cities, smart transportation, and resilient secure infrastructure. The intent is clear from the leadership that the future depends on how much transformative value can be unleashed from the network capabilities for societal progression.
This is where technologies like IoT, or its metamorphosis into Industry 4.0 and beyond, find a critical role, especially when coupled with AI and cloud. In our domestic market, this is now well appreciated. One of the ways that TCS is preparing for future demand domestically is by launching an AI powered sovereign cloud platform for India. The TCS SovereignSecure CloudTM, is a first-of-its-kind, indigenous and secure cloud built and managed entirely by TCS. This cloud comes with integrated AI capabilities to support government institutions, public sector enterprises, and regulated industries and is engineered to keep sensitive data within India’s borders.
Q: How do you see these ideas taking hold in the market?
AB: More and more, organizations are beginning to grasp the importance of embracing Industry 4.0 concepts and ideas to compete at the global level. This is driving demand in two areas. First, futuristic IoT systems are emerging with stringent Key Performance Indicator (KPI) requirements for real-time performance in sensing, analytics, and actuation. Second, there is a need for private networks with managed services to support such futuristic KPIs.
To facilitate the market, regulatory authorities in India are giving serious consideration to policies that will enable affordable private network services for enterprises of differing scales. We expect some positive policy formation in this regard. Assuming, there will be an emphasis on private 5G (and beyond) networks, widespread IoT deployment will be part and parcel of future public and private enterprise solutions in India.
Q: Earlier on, you mentioned your contributions to enhancing the CoAP protocol? Would you refresh our readers about CoAP in the IoT arena?
AB: Well, let me put it like this. The Internet was traditionally built by considering humans as both producers as well as consumers of the data that flows through it. The World Wide Web (WWW), or Web in short, became the most popular service overlayed on the Internet. HTTP became almost the de facto protocol. The concept RESTful Web Services became popular.
As IoT evolved, this caused some disruption in the traditional model on which the Internet was built. Now, the data sources are tiny sensors rather than humans. We also needed to deploy ‘web-service-like’ exchanges using sensors instead of conventional personal computers and servers.
As IoT is a fragmented space in terms of standards, many deployments started to retrofit the already well-established HTTP standard into IoT systems. But that proved to be inefficient in terms of resource usage. So, to meet the standardization gap in the IoT space, IETF commenced a new protocol standardization activity. The aim was to enable web-service-like exchanges for constrained devices while adhering to the RESTful principles of HTTP. This protocol was named Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and became standardized as RFC7252 in 2014.
Q: How did you take your ideas on managing resource-constraints in the IoT domain into the IETF?
AB: Around late 2011, when CoAP standardization was still in its early stages, we started to play with some early open-source implementations. At the same time, we encountered a vehicle tracking system built on HTTP, which suffered from excessive resource consumption and delays due to congestion. The sensor gateway on the device was quickly draining its battery, and the location updates took several seconds to complete, often erratically.
We replicated that system, deploying new CoAP code on a real sensor gateway, and plugged it into a vehicle. We found that while CoAP reduced the overhead drastically, we could save even more bandwidth and energy by adding more intelligence into the protocol.
For example, there were several use cases where a client device updating the state of a resource on a server did not require responses from the server. By blocking these unnecessary responses, we could reduce the system load, which is particularly crucial for systems handling numerous simultaneous exchanges.
Through these experiments, we proposed an improvement to CoAP that allows clients to selectively indicate whether a response from the server is necessary for certain requests. This enhancement, known as the no-response option for CoAP, was proposed in mid-2013. With persistent effort and support from TCS and the Internet Society, it was published as RFC 7967 after several rounds of critical review.
I am proud to say that this contribution is recognized as the first indigenous RFC from India. This is considered indigenous since all the background research happened in TCS’ lab in Kolkata, India, and all the contributing authors of this RFC were Indian nationals.
Q: How have your contributions had an impact on CoAP deployments?
AB: The work has resonated well with the technical community as it helps to improve the performance of many IoT solutions. Another benefit is to incorporate flexible semantics while exchanging data among network entities. This RFC has found adoption in specifications outside IETF as well. For example, the Fairhair alliance specification, which is now managed by Open Connectivity Forum (OCF), for building automation includes this RFC. We also find that this has been incorporated in some of the popular implementations of CoAP including:
- libcoap (https://libcoap.net/doc/reference/4.2.1/index.html),
- Californium (https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/iot.californium/releases/3.0.0),
- IoTvity (https://iotivity.org/getting-started/).
Q: What are your views on standardization and where it is most effective?
AB: From the beginning of my career, I had to follow 3GPP standards for product development and to ensure conformance. Later, when I moved to research, I carried that experience forward while shifting my perspective to that of a standards contributor.
Having said that, during the early years I understood that any technical standard document is essentially a result of dedicated research towards solving practical challenges. That is where the outcome of collective research becomes usable, in a practical sense, to many developers and engineers through standards documents. Standardization helps in the reuse of knowledge. It also leads to interoperable systems across vendors and geographies. This realization helped my smooth transition into a research role later in my career.
I see standardization as an effective way to disseminate solution-oriented research. This results in economic growth by ensuring interoperability across solutions, democratization of technologies, reduced time-to-market, customer confidence through conformance, products embodied with trusted security and privacy techniques.
Q: How did you learn about oneM2M, and what role do you see for the standard?
AB: I learned first about oneM2M during some discussions that I was following in IETF about ten years ago. At that time, I followed IETF activities closely, especially those topics dealing with the networking aspects of machine-to-machine communication, and how 5G impacts higher-layer protocols. My active engagement with oneM2M started when I got the opportunity to engage with TSDSI on behalf of TCS.
You will be happy to know that we are currently in the process of including RFC 7967 as part of the CoAP binding in oneM2M. This is particularly relevant in the context of lightweight oneM2M. Deutsche Telecom is leading the work item, and we are collaborating as the RFC author.
Q: India has major ambitions to influence technology standardization, notably via 6G? With RFC7967 being a ‘first’ for India, what lessons can you offer to others in India?
AB: First of all, TCS is a leading global organization. We have a presence in more than fifty countries, while our roots are deeply grounded in India. Whatever we build, we build it for the world.
That said, it is indeed paradoxical that, despite being an IT powerhouse and R&D hub for many national and international organizations, India’s contribution to technology standards has not scaled to match its latent capability. Encouragingly, over the years the Government of India has evolved its policies with a vision for Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat or self-reliant India which also encompasses the mission to be a leader in shaping future technologies in the 6G era.
TCS is committed to the vision of a self-reliant India. Our past success in converting indigenous research to a globally used IETF RFC reflects the national ethos of ‘make in India, make it for the world.’ It feels good to be among the early torchbearers, thanks to the forward-looking vision from TCS and support for our sustained engagement and perseverance. I have shared the story of TCS’ standardization journey, at the invitation of different Government and non-Government organizations, across the country in different awareness campaigns.
Compared to what we experienced when we started our journey, we now see a significant increase in awareness regarding the importance of standardization on a national level. Thanks to the relentless efforts in community building and enabling standards creation by organizations like TSDSI, I believe we are heading in the right direction.
Q: Do you have any closing observations about IoT and advice for researchers or practitioners?
AB: Well, I think it is fair to conclude that future network innovations are going to be driven by the requirements from futuristic application in industry verticals. IoT is one of those verticals. IoT plays a significant role from automation of operations to digital twin creation. As we move to more densification of networks, Edge-Cloud hybrid deployments, and massive twinning, we should expect to see more by way of security, mobility, and interoperability challenges.
We know that IoT suffers from technology fragmentation. With new requirements emerging, we can expect fragmentation to increase as future networks enable wider deployment of IoT systems in a wider variety of privately managed networks and cloud systems. The resultant problems in interoperability will increase. SDOs like oneM2M can function as the essential glue at a system-level in the interest of a smarter harmonized tomorrow. This is why it is always advisable for organizations to monitor system-level standardization initiatives and build with open-standard and interoperable technical specifications.
