Horizontal M2M platforms boost vertical industry: Effectiveness study for building energy management systems

Machine-To-Machine (M2M) is seen as driving enabler for smart solutions for future smart cities. Specialized vertical M2M solutions approaching the markets with the challenges to meet sustainable business solutions. However, it is essential to develop standard based horizontal service platforms in the domain of M2M industry to achieve the M2M vision, i.e., connecting all different types of devices to communicate with one another. This paper reviews M2M platforms from vertical domains as well as M2M related standardizations. While vertical proprietary M2M solutions provides some value to their vertical sectors, most challenges are identified in scalability and interoperability. Specifically, we perform an analysis centered on a building management M2M system (CAMPUS21) and two M2M standards (ETSI M2M & HGI) platforms. Identified gaps, e.g., incompatibilities on data model, dependencies on multiple vendors and restricted resource sharing are addressed with three major steps: (i) defining and sharing common terminologies, (ii) enabling to add semantic information, and (iii) exchanging semantic meaning instead of raw data. As solution, we suggest a required extension of horizontal M2M architecture in order to provide interconnection between proprietary M2M systems and standardized M2M systems, and draw lessons for conclusion in the future direction to realize the vision of horizontal M2M system.