Since 2012, over 200 participating organizations have joined in oneM2M’s international standardization project. Their contributions have shaped an open standard for end-to-end IoT systems that are applicable across a variety of application domains.
It has taken roughly a decade to lay the foundations for cellular-based, internet of things (IoT) systems. Manufacturers can design connected devices, drawing on a thriving market for cost-competitive modems. Data communications charges are relatively inexpensive while other market enablers include platforms for remote device management and tools for data analytics and visualization. ‘IoT’ is now a mainstream offering and one that businesses are no longer hesitant to adopt.
Added pressures, triggered by long-pandemic operating expectations, are shifting the adoption risk calculus even further. Now, organizations are contemplating IoT more strategically. More thought is going into vendor lock-in, proprietary technology and data-ownership issues.
Progress & Innovation
Innovation and long service-life systems raise inevitable questions about supplier risk. There is an implicit assumption that innovators, small and start-up service providers will remain in operation for many years. Take the instances of smart cities, factories, and transportation systems. Their service lives can be of the order of decades.
Over such durations, IoT applications and their enabling systems will evolve. There will be challenges of scale. There will be new requirements to address service innovation and business model experimentation. Consider environmental sensors in cities or in factories, for example. The initial use case might involve monitoring the level of pollutants for health reasons. Next generation use cases might involve sharing sensor data with other users from sister business-units and eventually third-party organizations. Transportation planners, ride-hailing businesses and emergency services are agencies that might purchase reliably sourced, environmental data that is reported at regular intervals. This is where an IoT supplier’s ability to evolve systems and incorporate innovative functionality might hamper progress and turn into a strategic risk.
Framework for standardization
The telecommunications and internet industries have shown how standardization provides the means to address vendor and technology lock-in risks. Moreover, theirs are evolving standards. They are primed for new capabilities and service innovation, as evidenced by the cellular industry’s 2G to 5G evolutions.
Standardization can seem slow-paced. As far back as 1926 the American industrialist, Henry Ford, observed that, “If you think ‘standardization’ as the best you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow – you get somewhere. But if you think of standards as confining, then progress stops”. In the case of the IoT, standardization calls for a horizontal architecture that is reusable across many industry domains. Its technical framework also needs to support simple and complex IoT systems. Some will be greenfield deployments while others involve interoperating with legacy and proprietary sub-systems.
oneM2M: The Open IoT Standard
Since 2012, over 200 participating organizations have joined in oneM2M’s international standardization project. Their contributions have shaped an open standard for end-to-end IoT systems that are applicable across a variety of application domains.
The oneM2M standard is complemented by an independently operated certification scheme run by the Global Certification Forum (GCF). oneM2M also organizes regular interoperability test events so that solution providers can validate their oneM2M implementations and check for cross-vendor interoperability.
In anticipation of future requirements, oneM2M’s standards release cycle provides a framework to address new use cases and industry needs. oneM2M is currently finalizing a set of specifications for Release 4 of the standard while conducting parallel work to plan Release 5 features. These include topics such as artificial intelligence (AI) for Internet of Things (IoT) systems, tools for data licensing and, privacy controls linked to GDPR and PIPA (Korea) regulations. Participation in oneM2M is open to organizations across the world. Bi-monthly technical plenaries provide a forum for knowledge exchange and exploration of emerging trends that are driving IoT innovation. Deployments of oneM2M systems and components span the globe, with recent activity stimulated by India’s adoption of oneM2M at the national level.
