On the Internet of Things

A very interesting new standardization effort is now taking off in ETSI. Recently the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Technical Committee was launched, and is aiming to fill a serious gap in today’s standardization of M2M systems and sensor networks (Internet of Things!). Most ETSI information is available to the public, go to the Committee Portal and click on M2M. Recently Sensinode has joined this ETSI group to help with sensor network integration and to help as a laison to IETF 6lowpan and roll. In the EU SENSEI Project we are designing sensor networking as an integral part of the Internet, and we hope to transfer knowledge into the ETSI effort as well.

M2M is loosely defined as the autonomous monitoring and control of machines, usually across the Internet, and mainly for enterprise applications.  This is very much a driving force behind the Internet of Things. Today there is very little standardization for M2M in particular. Instead M2M solutions make use of standard Internet, Cellular and Web technologies. Solutions however today are very verticalized, with a major lack of end-to-end application protocols and data representations, standardized interfaces and horizontalization. With the increased demand for remote monitoring, large smart metering deployments and the popularity of wireless embedded and sensor networks – this is a great time for standardizing an end-to-end approach.

The goals of the ETSI M2M committee include:

• To develop and maintain an end-to-end architecture for M2M.
• To indentify gaps in current standardization, and to fill those gaps.
• Work includes sensor network integration, naming, addressing, location, QoS, security, charging, management, application interfaces and hardware interfaces.
• In particular Smart Metering is a major use case, and IETF 6lowpan promising for integration.

The technical committee so-far has a strong end-to-end IP philosophy behind it, so it looks promising as a step towards IoT standardization.