oneM2M implications on IOT platforms for enterprises

By: Arvind Gopalakrishnan, Vice President – Sales Engineering, Solutions and Customer Success, Aeris Communications

Every twelve to eighteen months, computers double their capabilities, and so do the information technologies that use them (Moore's law). This phenomena is a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth as the advances in wireless communications, storage capacity, embedded processing power, and IT technologies have led to inexpensive devices, sensors, and actuators with increased computing power and low power consumption. With a huge base of connected devices, M2M will grow rapidly in terms of revenue. The number of connected devices is projected to grow from 22.9B in 2016 to 50.1B by 2020, attaining a 21.62% CAGR in four years. (Source: World Economic Forum, Is this the future of the Internet of Things? November 27, 2015). McKinsey estimates the potential economic impact of IoT in 2025 including consumer surplus is $3.9T to $11.1T trillion. These advances provide a huge opportunity for growth in M2M/IoT applications.

Cisco predicts the global Internet of Things market will be $14.4 trillion by 2022, with the majority invested in improving customer experiences. Additional areas of investment include, reducing the time-to-market ($3 trillion), improving supply chain and logistics ($2.7 trillion), cost reduction strategies ($2.5 trillion) and increasing employee productivity ($2.5 trillion). M2M/IoT technologies, therefore, will benefit a broad range of market segments: smart grid, telematics, eHealth/mHealth, vehicular systems, industrial control, home automation, and environmental monitoring to name a few. According to Digital Industry Insider nearly $6 trillion will be spent on IoT solutions over the next five years.

Global standards are defining service layer solutions to accelerate the development and reuse of M2M/IoT data and applications. Service Delivery Platform (SDP) allows solution providers to capture the full potential of their M2M/IoT businesses. It is interesting to note that over the last decade, a range of M2M platforms has emerged to assist and accelerate the development of M2M applications. Until recently, these M2M platforms have tended to focus on speeding the development of stovepipe M2M applications, rather than supporting an open application environment that allows application developers to easily configure applications that draw inputs from multiple M2M (and other) applications.

Providing assurance to those investing in IoT new services is critical. Moving from proof of concept stage to commercial and large scale deployments is a challenge today as enterprises need to be sure that what is being built is secure, interoperable, scalable and robust. oneM2M brings a ray of hope. OneM2M Release standards provides a standard M2M middleware solution with common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for scalable and horizontal M2M/IoT services, featuring:

Standardized End-to-End (E2E) Solution: Integrates all M2M/IoT entities from Applications, Devices, and Gateways to Servers as an E2E and fully standards-compatible solution. An M2M/IoT Gateway facilitates advanced local proxy and bulk management services for devices behind a Gateway

Scalable Service Platform: A common architecture, provides scalability, extensibility and distributed nature for cloud based deployments, as well as configurations for platforms with limited capabilities such as gateways and low power, battery-operated M2M/IoT devices

Common Services Layer: Architecturally Service entities for Devices, Gateways, and Servers that enable providers to generate new revenues from M2M/IoT via service platforms. Advanced features include platform-agnostic and smooth binding with HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)

RESTful Architecture: RESTful interfaces and a hierarchical resource tree, simplify and optimize resource manipulations and enable quick and efficient application development for a broad range of devices, especially constrained M2M/IoT Devices

Policy Based Charging: Allows for policy-based configurable trigger functions, record storing to correlate charging records from multiple entities (i.e. cellular and M2M/IoT service platforms), and both offline and online charging

Lightweight M2M: Supports the emerging OMA standard for M2M/IoT device management
Cognitive Semantic Services: Supports cognitive, non-opaque data management including mining and analytics to enable semantic data services at the M2M/IoT service layer
Automated Service Discovery: Significantly reduces management costs and automates the deployment process by removing human involvement and offline provisioning

M2M Cloud Platform: Cloud-based platform supports virtualized and configurable M2M Server, which can be a private or public cloud

Flexible Service Entities and Application APIs: Supports modular design and allows for use of different application protocols (CoAP, HTTP, MQTT) and different implementations without rework.

Service Entity Software Platform: Available in binary packages for M2M/IoT Devices, Gateways, and Servers

IoT Feature Support: Supports advanced features that facilitate the evolution to the Internet-of-Things including data analytics, identity management, event management, and service negotiation.
Specifically, the protocol stack must provide the mechanisms necessary to support
· device discovery and device capabilities discovery
· reliable message transport and delivery
· data integrity
· data confidentiality
· Quality of Service
· Multi-casting/ broadcasting

Business benefits of adopting oneM2M for IoT platforms include,
· Enables building a larger ecosystem of device vendors separately from the M2M/ IoT solution providers.
· Promotes better competition and standardization of products and services thereby reducing cost of delivering services
· Improves time to market end-to-end solution
· Creates more relevant business and revenue model streams
· Decouples the solution provider from device manufacturer
· Allows creation of new stream of business for Platforms vendors
· Better device and application managed services at a lower cost

In conclusion, the Internet of Things brings together so many previously disparate systems together- from technology to devices to vendors and even industries. The key to success is convergence of telecoms, IT and consumer electronics with software, applications, data handling and ensuring security and data privacy all the while. oneM2M aims to create a platform for interoperability to bring the entire M2M and IoT ecosystem together.