STUDY NOTES M2M TO

IOT- OVERVIEW
Mr S P MANIRAJ
Mr.PRABHU
Dr S SURESH,AP/CSE
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
● An architecture can be described in several different views to capture specific properties that are of
relevance to model, and the views chosen in this book are the functional view, deployment view, process
view, and information view.
● When creating a model for the reference architecture, one needs to establish overall objectives for the
architecture as well as design principles that come from understanding some of the desired major features
of the resulting system solution.
● For instance, an overall objective might be to decouple application logic from communication mechanisms,
and typical design principles might then be to design for protocol interoperability and to design for
encapsulated service descriptions.
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
The problem domain is about understanding the applications of interest, for example, developed through
scenario building and use case analysis in order to derive requirements. These constraints can be technical, like
limited power availability in wireless sensor nodes, or non-technical, like constraints coming from legislation or
business.

The lower level is referred to as the solution domain. where design objectives and principles are established,
conceptual views are refined, required functions are identified, and where logical partitions of functionality and
information are described. Often this is where a logical architecture is defined, or network architecture in the
form of a network topology diagram is produced.

It is also common to identify suitable technology components such as operating systems and protocols or
protocol stacks at this level. The actual system solution is finally captured by a system design that typically
results in actual software and hardware components, as well as information on how these are to be configured,
deployed, and provisioned.
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
Main design principles and needed capabilities include:
The overall design objective of IoT architecture shall be to target a horizontal system of real-world services
that are open, service-oriented, secure, and offer trust.
❏Design for reuse of deployed IoT resources across application domains.
❏Design for a set of support services that provide open service-oriented capabilities and can be used for
application development and execution.
❏Design for different abstraction levels that hide underlying complexities and heterogeneities.
❏Design for sensing and actors taking on different roles of providing and using services across different
business domains and value chains.
❏Design for ensuring trust, security, and privacy.
❏Design for scalability, performance, and effectiveness.
❏Design for evolvability, heterogeneity, and simplicity of integration.
❏Design for simplicity of management.
❏Design for different service delivery models.
❏Design for lifecycle support.
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
IoT architecture outline:

Asset Layer: The assets of interest are the

real-world objects and entities that are subject
to being monitored and controlled, as well as
having digital representations and identities.

Communication Layer: provide the means for

connectivity between the resources on one
end and the different computing infrastructures
that host and execute service support logic
and application logic on the other end.
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
Service Support Layer: provides support services to perform common and routine tasks and are typically
executing in data centers or server farms inside organizations or in a cloud environment.
Data and Information Layer: provides a more abstract set of functions as its main purposes are to capture
knowledge and provide advanced control logic support. Key concepts here include data and information
models and knowledge representation in general, and the focus is on the organization of information.
Application Layer: provides the specific IoT applications
Business Layer: focuses on supporting the core business or operations of any enterprise, organization, or
individual that is interested in IoT applications
Management: as the name implies, deals with management of various parts of the system solution related
to its operation, maintenance, administration, and provisioning.
Security: is about protection of the system, its information and services, from external threats or any other
harm. Security measures are usually required across all layers, for instance, providing communication
security and information security.
Data and Services: Data and Service processing can, from a topological perspective, be done in a very
distributed fashion and at different levels of complexity. Basic event filtering and simpler aggregation, such
as data averaging, can take place in individual sensor nodes in WSANs, contextual metadata such as
location and temporal information can be added to sensor readings, and further aggregation can take place
higher up in the network topology.
M2M to IoT An Architectural Overview
Standards considerations:
●The first consideration is that standards are developed across a number of different industries.
●The second consideration is that some standardization activities define entire systems or parts of
systems, and other standards organizations target development of specific pieces of technologies, for
instance, specific protocols.
●The third and final consideration is about the lifecycle process of standards. Many times, standards are
emerging as a result of collaborative research involving both academia and industry. In other situations,
technology selection for standardization can happen as part of regulatory or legislative processes.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Devices and gateways:

A device can be characterized as having several properties, including:

• Microcontroller: 8-, 16-, or 32-bit working memory and storage.
• Power Source: Fixed, battery, energy harvesting, or hybrid.
• Sensors and Actuators: Onboard sensors and actuators, or circuitry that allows them to be connected,
sampled, conditioned, and controlled.
• Communication: Cellular, wireless, or wired for LAN and WAN communication.
• Operating System (OS): Main-loop, event-based, real-time, or full-featured OS.
• Applications: Simple sensor sampling or more advanced applications.
• User Interface: Display, buttons, or other functions for user interaction.
• Device Management (DM): Provisioning, firmware, bootstrapping, and monitoring.
• Execution Environment (EE): Application lifecycle management and Application Programming Interface (API).
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Device types:

• Basic Devices: Devices that only provide the basic services of sensor readings
and/or actuation tasks, and in some cases limited support for user interaction. LAN
communication is supported via wired or wireless technology, thus a gateway is
needed to provide the WAN connection.
• Advanced Devices: In this case the devices also host the application logic and a
WAN connection. They may also feature device management and an execution
environment for hosting multiple applications. Gateway devices are most likely to
fall into this category.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Deployment scenarios for devices:

• Home Alarms: Such devices typically include motion detectors, magnetic sensors, and smoke detectors. A central
unit takes care of the application logic that calls security and sounds an alarm if a sensor is activated when the alarm
is armed. The central unit also handles the WAN connection towards the alarm central. These systems are currently
often based on proprietary radio protocols.

• Smart Meters: The meters are installed in the households and measure consumption of, for example, electricity and
gas. A concentrator gateway collects data from the meters, performs aggregation, and periodically transmits the
aggregated data to an application server over a cellular connection. By using a capillary network technology (e.g.
802.15.4), it’s possible to extend the range of the concentrator gateway by allowing meters in the periphery to use
other meters as extenders, and interface with handheld devices on the Home Area Network side.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Deployment scenarios for devices:

• Building Automation Systems (BASs): Such devices include thermostats, fans, motion detectors, and
boilers, which are controlled by local facilities, but can also be remotely operated.
• Standalone Smart Thermostats: These use Wi-Fi to communicate with web services. Examples for
advanced devices, meanwhile, include:
• Onboard units in cars that perform remote monitoring and configuration over a cellular connection.
• Robots and autonomous vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles that can work both
autonomously or by remote control using a cellular connection.
• Video cameras for remote monitoring over 3G and LTE.
• Oil well monitoring and collection of data points from remote devices.
• Connected printers that can be upgraded and serviced remotely.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Basic devices:
●These devices are often intended for a single purpose, such as measuring air pressure or closing a valve. In
some cases several functions are deployed on the same device, such as monitoring humidity, temperature, and
light level.
●The requirements on hardware are low, both in terms of processing power and memory.
●The main focus is on keeping the bill of materials (BOM) as low as possible by using inexpensive microcontrollers
with built-in memory and storage, often on an SoC-integrated circuit with all main components on one single chip.
●Another common goal is to enable battery as a power source, with a lifespan of a year and upwards by using
ultra-low energy microcontrollers.
●Because a basic device lacks a WAN interface according to our definition, a gateway of some form is necessary.
The gateway together with the connected devices form a capillary network. The microcontroller contains
most of the radio functions needed for communicating with the gateway and other devices in the same
capillary network. An external antenna is, however, necessary, and preferably a filter that removes unwanted
frequencies, e.g. a surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
● Due to limited computational resources, these devices commonly do not use a typical OS.

● It may be something as simple as a single-threaded main-loop or a low-end OS such as

FreeRTOS, Atomthreads, AVIX-RT, ChibiOS/RT, ERIKA Enterprise, TinyOS, or Thingsquare
Mist/Contiki.

● These OSes offer basic functionality, e.g. memory and concurrency model management,
(sensor and radio) drivers, threading, TCP/IP, and higher-level protocol stacks.

● The actual application logic is located on top of the OS or in the main-loop. A typical task for the
application logic is to read values from the sensors and to provide these over the LAN interface in a
semantically correct manner with the correct units.
 M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Gateways:
●A gateway serves as a translator between different protocols, e.g. between IEEE 802.15.4 or IEEE
802.11, to Ethernet or cellular.
●There are many different types of gateways, which can work on different levels in the protocol layers.
Most often a gateway refers to a device that performs translation of the physical and link layer, but
application layer gateways (ALGs) are also common. The latter is preferably avoided because it adds
complexity and is a common source of error in deployments.
●Some examples of ALGs include the ZigBee Gateway Device (ZigBee Alliance 2011), which
translates from ZigBee to SOAP and IP, or gateways that translate from Constrained Application
Protocol (CoAP) to HyperText Transfer Protocol/Representational State Transfer (HTTP/REST).
For some LAN technologies, such as 802.11 and Z-Wave, the gateway is used for inclusion and
exclusion of devices. This typically works by activating the gateway into inclusion or exclusion mode
and by pressing a button on the device to be added or removed from the network.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
● Typical functions for data management include performing sensor readings and caching this data, as well
as filtering, concentrating, and aggregating the data before transmitting it to back-end servers.

● The benefit of hosting this logic on the gateway instead of in the network is to avoid downtime in case of
WAN connection failure, minimize usage of costly cellular data, and reduce latency.

● To facilitate efficient management of applications on the gateway, it’s necessary to include an execution
environment. The execution environment is responsible for the lifecycle management of the
applications, including installation, pausing, stopping, configuration, and uninstallation of the
applications.e.g OSGi environment.

● Device management (DM) is an essential part of the IoT and provides efficient means to perform many
of the management tasks for devices: Provisioning, Device Configuration, Software Upgrades, Fault
Management
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Advanced devices:

The distinction between basic devices, gateways, and advanced devices is not cut in
stone, but some features that can characterize an advanced device are the following:
• A powerful CPU or microcontroller with enough memory and storage
to host advanced applications, such as a printer offering functions for
copying, faxing, printing, and remote management.
• A more advanced user interface with, for example, display and
advanced user input in the form of a keypad or touch screen.
• Video or other high bandwidth functions.
 M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Need for networking:
Local and wide area networking:
Network links rely upon a physical medium, such as electrical wires, air, and optical fibers, over which data can
be sent from one network node to the next. It is not uncommon for these media to be grouped either as wired or
wireless.
Technically, the medium selected, or more accurately, the technological solution designed and implemented to
communicate over that medium, is the primary enabler of bandwidth without which, certain applications are
infeasible.
When direct communication between two nodes over a physical medium is not possible, networking can allow
for these devices to communicate over a number of hops. In order to achieve this, nodes of the network must
have an awareness of all nodes in the network with which they can indirectly communicate. This can be a direct
connection over one link (edge, the transition or communication between two nodes over a link), or
knowledge of a route to the desired (destination) node by communicating through cooperating nodes,
over multiple edges.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
● A Local Area Network (LAN) was traditionally distinguishable from a Wide Area Network (WAN)
based on the geographic coverage requirements of the network, and the need for third party, or
leased, communication infrastructure. In the case of the LAN, a smaller geographic region is
covered, such as a commercial building, an office block, or a home, and does not require any
leased communications infrastructure.
● WANs provide communication links that cover longer distances, such as across metropolitan,
regional, or by textbook definition, global geographic areas. In practice, WANs are often used to link
LANs and Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN)
● There are differences between the technologies that enable LANs and WANs. In the simplest case
for each, these can be grouped as wired or wireless. The most popular wired LAN technology is
Ethernet. Wi-Fi is the most prevalent wireless LAN (WLAN) technology
● Wireless WAN (WWAN), as a descriptor, covers cellular mobile tele- communication networks, a
significant departure from WLAN in terms of technology, coverage, network infrastructure, and
architecture. The current generation of WWAN technology includes LTE (or 4G) and WiMAX.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Considering M2M and IoT applications, there are likely to exist a combination of traditional networking
approaches. The need exists to interconnect devices (generally integrated microsystems) with central data
processing and decision support systems, in addition to one another. The business logic and requirements for
each embodiment will differ on a case-by-case basis.

Practically, these devices will not warrant individual connections to leased networking infrastructure (e.g.
putting a SIM card in each device and using the cellular network for fast IP connectivity). This approach is
thought to be prohibitive due to cost, among other factors. A more likely scenario is where, similar to WLAN
technologies, a geographic region can be covered by a network of devices that connect to the Internet
via a gateway device, which may use a leased network connection.

The potential complexity of these networks is enormous. For example, a gateway device can access the IP
backbone over a WWAN (e.g. GPRS/UMTS/LTE/WiMAX) link, or over a WLAN link, where the leased
infrastructure would be that of the ISP providing backbone connectivity to the WLAN in its own right, as above.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Wide area networking:
●WANs are typically required to bridge the M2M Device Domain to the backhaul network, thus
providing a proxy that allows information (data, commands, etc.) to traverse heterogeneous
networks. This is seen as a core requirement to provide communications services between the M2M
service enablement and the physical deployments of devices in the field.

●Thus, the WAN is capable of providing the bi-directional communications links between services and
devices. This, however, must be achieved by meansof physical and logical proxy.
●The proxy is achieved using an M2M Gateway Device.

●Depending on the situation, there are, in general, a number of candidate technologies to select from. As
before, the M2M Gateway Device is typically an inte-grated microsystem with multiple
communications interfaces and computational capabilities. It is a critical component in the
functional architecture, as it must be capable of handling all of the necessary interfacing to the M2M
Service Capabilities and Management Functions
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
The WAN covers larger geographic regions using wireless (licensed and un-licensed spectra) as well as wire-based
access. WAN technologies include cellular networks (using several generations of technologies), DSL, WiMAX, Wi-Fi,
Ethernet, Satellite, and so forth.
The WAN delivers a packet-based service using IP as default. However, circuit-based services can also be used in
certain situations.
In the M2M context, important functions of the WAN include:
• The main function of the WAN is to establish connectivity between capillary networks, hosting sensors, and
actuators, and the M2M service enablement.

The default connectivity mode is packet-based using the IP family of technologies. Many different types of messages
can be sent and received. These
include messages originating as, for example, a message sent from a sensor in an M2M Area Network and resulting in
an SMS received from the M2M Gateway or Application (e.g. by a relevant stakeholder
with SMS notifications configured for when sensor readings breach particular sensing thresholds.).

• Use of identity management techniques (primarily of M2M devices) in cellular and non-cellular domains to grant right-
of-use of the WAN resource.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
The following techniques are used for these
purposes:
• MCIM (Machine Communications Identity Module) for remote provisioning of SIM targeting M2M devices.
• xSIM (x-Subscription Identity Module), like SIM, USIM, ISIM.
• Interface identifiers, an example of which is the MAC address of the device, typically stored in hardware.
• Authentication/registration type of functions (device focused).
• Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA), such as RADIUS services.
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), e.g. employing deployment-specific configuration parameters
specified by device, user, or application-specific parameters residing in a directory.
• Subscription services (device-focused).
• Directory services, e.g. containing user profiles and various device(s) parameter(s), setting(s), and
combinations thereof.
M2M-specific considerations include, in particular:
• MCIM (cf. 3GPP SA3 work).
• User Data Management (e.g. subscription management).
• Network optimizations (cf. 3GPP SA2 work).
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
Local area networking:
●Capillary networks are typically autonomous, self-contained systems of M2M devices that may be
connected to the cloud via an appropriate Gateway. They are often deployed in controlled environments
such as vehicles, buildings, apartments, factories, bodies, etc. (Figure 5.4) in order to collect sensor
measurements, generate events should sensing thresholds be breached, and sometimes control specific
features of interest (e.g. heart rate of a patient, environmental data on a factory floor, car speed, air con-
ditioning appliances, etc.). There will exist numerous capillary networks that will employ short-range wired
and wireless communication and networking technologies.
●For certain application areas, there is a need for autonomous local operation of the capillary network.
That is, not everything needs to be sent to, or potentially be controlled via, the cloud.
●The M2M devices in a capillary network are typically thought to be low-capability nodes (e.g. battery
operated, with limited security capabilities) for cost reasons, and should operate autonomously. For this
reason, a GW/application server will naturally also be part of the architected solution for capillary
networks.
M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals
● More and more (currently closed) capillary networks will open up for integration with the enterprise
back end systems. For capillary networks that expose devices to the cloud/Internet, IP is
envisioned to be the common waist. IPv6 will be the protocol of choice for M2M devices that
operate a 6LoWPAN-based stack. IPv4 will still be used for capillary networks operating in non-
6LoWPAN IP stacks (e.g. Wi-Fi capillary networks).
● In terms of short-range communication technology convergence, an IPv6 stack with 6LoWPAN
running above the physical medium is expected.
● The physical medium may be IEEE 802.15.4 (i.e. wireless), but can also be various PLC or other
wired solutions (e.g. Homeplug or P1902).
● Legacy ZigBee application profiles will be used in the future in addition to newer ZigBee IP and
IEEE 802.15.4 6LoWPAN/RPL/CoAP networks. It is expected that the binary versions of the
application profiles will be used for efficiency reasons (e.g. an automation profile device may be a
temperature sensor not necessarily connected to the mains).
References
● Jan Holler, VlasiosTsiatsis, Catherine Mulligan, Stefan Avesand, StamatisKarnouskos, DavidBoyle,
“From Machine-to-Machine to the Internet of Things: Introduction to a New Age of Intelligence”,1st
Edition, Academic Press, 2014.
● Peter Waher, “Learning Internet of Things”, PACKT publishing, BIRMINGHAM – MUMBAI