MicroMMS: a compact abstract syntax for MMS

MMS (Manufacturing Message Specification) was initially designed for interconnection of industrial devices in manufacturing and process control applications. MMS can also be applied to new areas such as building automation, field buses and remote meter reading. Such applications have much stronger constraints concerning the available processing power and memory. The use of an MMS specified in ASN.1 and its associated Basic Encoding Rules (BER) can be questioned for such applications. ASN.1 and BER very often lead to long messages (PDUs) that require a time consuming encoding or decoding process. The purpose of this study is to define a new abstract syntax for MMS that offers the same functionality as the standard MMS abstract syntax but that leads to shorter PDUs. The principle adopted is that the essence of MMS is not in its abstract syntax but in its service definition, namely the set of MMS objects, services and parameters defined in ISO/IEC 9506-1.<>