Perspectives on M2M protocols

In the last years, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications evolved as one of the major trends shaping the development of services in the future Internet. The use of M2M technologies is rapidly increasing in different fields such as Health Care, Automotive, Energy, Consumer Electronics, manufacturing, security and Banking. With that rapid increase different protocols had been developed for M2M communications and device management such as CoAP, MQTT and LwM2M. The objective of the paper is to provide synopsis of the different M2M protocols. The paper discusses the pros and cons of each of the protocols and identify their open problems. Up to our knowledge, it is the first study to provide such comparison between the different M2M protocol. The comparison is based on supported functions, network overhead, network reliability and security beside highlighting the different protocol architectures. The paper works as a start point for producing efficient M2M protocols.