The M2M Connectivity Framework: Towards an IoT Landscape

As the Internet, in due course, developed, more and more computing devices became connected, in particular mobile devices. The internet-of-things (IoT) is emerging and well underway, and the majority of internet traffic will be dominated by things rather than by computers built to fit the needs of humans. Connectivity is a prerequisite to machine-to-machine (M2M) communications featuring many-to-many, low-power, quality-of-service (QoS), fail over, multi-radio, multi-transport and orders of magnitude more nodes than the conventional counterpart, which makes management become extremely difficult. Development, adoption, and implementation of connectivity middleware are necessitated to facilitate the growth of M2M applications, and bring us closer to the IoT vision. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, it offers the methodological lessons learned for addressing the connectivity in the internet of things. Second, it provides insight for deploying an IoT platform in the real world for things of diverse nature.