Signalet

Signalet is a signaling protocol proposed for cross-domain control-plane communication in digital networks and Internet of Things environments. The goal is to minimize signaling overhead while ensuring fast, reliable delivery of control messages between devices, services, and edge nodes.

Design emphasizes a layered approach with a small, binary-encoded core and optional layers for transport, security, and policy. The Core Protocol handles event routing and state synchronization, while the Transport Layer supports UDP/TLS or QUIC for low-latency delivery. Security is built into the protocol with mutual authentication, encryption, and fine-grained access control. Identity is managed via an extensible digital-id framework, and discovery uses a lightweight service registry.

Key features include publish/subscribe and request/response patterns, compact encoding (CBOR or Protobuf), backpressure signaling, and quality-of-service classes. It supports offline operation through local queues and reconciliation on reconnect, and offers telemetry for observability. Versioning and backward compatibility are designed through a capability negotiation mechanism.

Signalet is not part of any formal international standard as of the current literature. Implementations vary and are often proprietary or experimental. Some open-source projects describe Signalet-inspired messaging, but interoperability between implementations is limited without a common profile. It is sometimes discussed as a potential foundation for edge-native control planes in 5G, industrial automation, and large-scale IoT deployments.

Typical applications include device orchestration in edge clouds, microservices coordination, event-driven automation in smart factories, fleet management, and real-time status signaling for autonomous systems.

Critics point to fragmentation risk, security challenges, and the overhead of maintaining parallel signaling stacks across vendors. Proponents argue that a well-designed Signalet profile could reduce cross-network signaling traffic and simplify governance for complex deployments.