Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications enable networked devices and services to exchange information and perform actions seamlessly without the need for human intervention. They are viewed as a key enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ubiquitous applications, like mobile healthcare, telemetry, or intelligent transport systems. We survey existing work on mobile M2M communications, we identify open challenges that have a direct impact on performance and resource usage efficiency, especially the impact on energy efficiency, and we review techniques to improve communications. We review the ETSI standard and application protocols, and draw considerations on the impact of their use in constrained mobile devices. Nowadays, smartphones are equipped with a wide range of embedded sensors, with varied local and wide area connectivity capabilities, and thus they offer a unique opportunity to serve as mobile gateways for other more constrained devices with local connectivity. At the same time, they can gather context data about users and environment from the embedded sensors. These capabilities may be crucial for mobile M2M applications. Finally, in this paper, we consider a scenario where smartphones are used as gateways that collect and aggregate data from sensors in a cellular network. We conclude that, in order for their use to the feasible in terms of a normal depletion time of a smartphone's battery, it is a good advice to maximize the collection of data necessary to be transmitted from nearby sensors, and maximize the intervals between transmissions. More research is required to devise energy efficient transmission methods that enable the use of smartphones as mobile gateways.

Towards efficient mobile M2M communications: survey and open challenges.

Machine to Machine (M2M) will change the wireless industry. The M2M will allow to create new services which has potential applications in every industry. The M2M could be use for health, survival system, energy and automotive industries. Most M2M devices have multiband antennas. The antenna needs to be carefully designed to meet the radiating properties as required by applications for each frequency band. A compact antenna operates at four different frequency bands with overall size of 40 mm × 22 mm × 1.52 mm is proposed here. The antenna is covering; Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Broadband Personal Communication Service (PCS), Digital Cellular System (DCS), and Personal Handy-phone System (PHS) bands at 1.8-1.9 GHz, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), Wireless Communications Service (WCS), Zigbee and Blutooth at 2.35-2.5 GHz, WiMAX at 3.3-3.6 GHz, and as well as available frequencies (licensed and unlicensed) of World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) bands at 5.1-5.9 GHz. Simulation results of the designed antenna are presented.

Compact printed multiband antenna for M2M applications

There is a large variety of Internet of things (IoT) devices and their peripherals available in consumer markets, and IoT deployers should work on customizing device drivers that are compatible with their peripherals. Implementing compatible device drivers, however, often requires a burden of work. This paper proposes a generic platform that enables plug-and-play (PnP) integration for sensors and actuators to allow the addition and removal of IoT device peripherals without re-customizing all the device drivers. To this end, we employ IoT ontologies and semantics to represent IoT device characteristics and to infer IoT device behaviors. IoT device behavior is then passed to the generic device driver to cover device-specific operation. Since the generic device driver selectively operates most of the available function calls required in IoT devices, most of the programming work that is normally required for device customization is removed, and management overhead for software installation and maintenance can be minimized. To this end, we employ IoT ontologies and semantics as well as generic programming techniques in the generic platform in order to configure and control IoT devices. In the proposed platform, IoT device characteristics, including I/O functions and configuration rules, are defined using custom-built IoT ontologies, and operational behaviors are inferred through SPARQL queries. The generic platform then passes function-call name and configuration rules corresponding to the newly added peripheral device’s specification. The experimental results show that our generic platform covers most of the popular sensors available in the market. Our solution therefore enables a true PnP experience of sensors and actuator peripherals in IoT devices.

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A generic Internet of things (IoT) platform supporting plug-and-play device management based on the semantic web

The Internet of Things (IoT) emerges as a myriad of devices and services that interact to build complex distributed applications. Interoperability and standardization are imperative for the realization of this vision. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications standards provided by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) can be the middleware that glues together the IoT. However, standards are highly complex and require a large amount of interpretation, deployments are currently scarce, and performance evaluations are simplistic or speculative, though the envisioned interoperability can greatly reduce the development and deployment costs. IoT applications are currently exploiting the growing number of smartphone users as well as the smartphone’s enhanced connectivity powered by the ubiquity of mobile networks and sensing capabilities. In mobile M2M communications, smartphones are the natural choice to act as M2M gateways (GWs), working as proxy for nearby devices with constrained resources and limited connectivity, and used as sensors themselves. However, the use of smartphones as M2M GWs can have an impact on the smartphone usability and introduce undesirable battery depletion due to network accesses. From a usability perspective, any additional battery depletion caused by the GW functionality should remain unnoticed, or nearly so. This means that transmission of sensor information should be the most energy efficient as possible. Nevertheless, each transmission can be performed with several different technologies, each with different power consumption profiles as well as quality of service guarantees. The work presented throughout this dissertation seeks to characterize, evaluate, and improve the performance of mobile GWs in M2M communications, investigating the benefits of the interoperability introduced by standards, of the concurrent use of different networks in heterogeneous networks scenarios as well as of the exploitation of opportunistic transmissions and the use of network coding techniques. First, as a motivating exploratory experiment, we deploy and evaluate an IoT service composition with mobile GWs to understand how do current IoT applications perform using M2M middleware. We design and implement a mobile e-health application on top of rising standards of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure: ETSI M2M for interconnecting devices and services, and open Electronic Health Record (EHR) for data semantics, storing, and making data available. As it plays a key role in the system, we also report the design, development, and performance evaluation of an ETSI M2M GW, consisting of an M2M GW Service Capability Layer (GSCL) and an M2M GW Application (GA), instantiated in a smartphone. We use nearly 480 hours of data from a pilot in which 10 people were remotely monitored for 3 weeks. We mea-

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Towards Efficient Mobile IoT with Heterogeneous Networks

Internet of Things is a networking platform where billions of every day devices communicate intelligently making every day communication highly informative The IoT defines a world-wide cyber-physical system with a plethora of applications in the fields of demotics, e-health, goods monitoring and logistics, among others The use of cross-layer communication schemes to provide adaptive solutions for the IoT is motivated by the high heterogeneity in the hardware capabilities and the communication requirements among things In this article, a novel Delta Diagram synthesis for the IoT is proposed to accurately capture both the high heterogeneity of the IoT and the impact of the Internet as part of the network architecture Furthermore, a novel modified Grey Wolf Optimizer framework is proposed to obtain optimal routing paths and the communication parameters among things, by exploiting the interrelations among different layer functionalities in the IoT Moreover, a cross-layer communication protocol is utilized to implement and test this optimization framework in practical scenarios The results show that the proposed solution can achieve a global communication optimum and outperforms existing layered solutions The novel Delta-diagram is a preliminary step towards providing efficient and reliable end-to-end communication in the IoT which may be extended to other dimensions of IoT like security and hardware synthesis

A Delta-Diagram Based Synthesis for Cross Layer Optimization Modeling of IoT

Due to the growing market and research interests on communication protocols for applications that require little or no human intervention, called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications, the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) founded in 2009 a Technical Committee on the topic, which has released its first complete set of technical recommendations in October 2011 as ETSI M2M Release 1. The standard is agnostic with respect to both the application domains in which it can be used, ranging from, e.g., smart grid to personal health systems, and the underlying data transport and access technologies. We demonstrate the feasibility of an ETSI-compliant complete end-to-end system, which uses the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) protocol under definition at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), showing its potential to meet the expectations of M2M applications of practical interest.

Nick Podias

Papers

ETSI M2M release 1 demonstration