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GSMA places operators' towel on Internet of Things deckchair

Tells devs how to use mobe networks for M2M IoT

The Internet of Things is coming and the GSMA wants all the things to play nicely on the networks.

A set of guidelines (PDF) has been published by the association, which represents the interests of mobile operators, in a bid to prevent the massive congestion issues which were caused by smartphones.

In the report, the GSMA says:

Many smartphone application developers inadvertently created many inefficient applications. Over the past decade Mobile Network Operators, smartphone device makers and smartphone application developers have worked to resolve these difficulties.

Which is perhaps a nice way of saying “Apple’s signalling was pants until the operators bullied it into fixing the problems".

Much of the issue is about mindset, where developers are used to reliable, high speed, free broadband and mains power. None of these are available once you go mobile. It’s envisaged that there will be a number, perhaps a very large number, of devices migrating to a service platform, a server which aggregates the information. This might be a billing platform for meters or a traffic monitoring platform for fleet tracking. The guidelines suggest that multiple technologies are used in a scenario where there are more than 10,000 devices on one network.

'Always be prepared to handle a communications requests fail'

The specification stipulates that devices behave sensibly on the network, aggregating and compressing data before transmitting – and if they have to send data frequently, do not constantly wake up the network and shut it down but rather use “always on” modes. It wants the devices to use the mobile network operators' APIs to do this.

If the device polls, it should ask the network how often to poll or stick with 29 minutes because many mobile network operators will clear the Network Address Translation entry for the IoT devices data session 30 minutes after the last communication.

This, of course, assumes good coverage and that the device will get through first time. The spec does, however, say that the device should “always be prepared to handle situations when communications requests fail”. And to do this, the spec gives some processes of counting failed attempts and monitoring when the failed attempts occur. It stipulates letting the service platform know if there are excessive attempts – assuming of course that it can get through. All this is to avoid what the GSMA calls “Runaway situations”.

There are notes on power usage and that the service platform should be told if there is excessive power usage, and an expectation that the device will go to sleep when possible.

There is also an emphasis on remote control of the devices with firmware over the air and the use of embedded SIMs. This means that if it’s necessary to change mobile network, the service provider doesn’t have to send out a man in a van to swap SIM cards.

The GSMA commissioned a separate report on this from Beecham Research. The CEO of Beecham, Robin Duke-Woolley, said: “The availability of the GSMA Embedded SIM Specification is a big deal for the connected devices market.” He added: “This is targeted primarily at the OEM community to make it easier and more streamlined both to build cellular connectivity into their products and to sell them through many more channels to market. It also considerably opens up the second-hand market in cars and other products for continued use of support services by second and subsequent owners.”

While the IoT standards will support IPv4, there is understandably strong encouragement to use IPv6. It’ll be necessary if the predictions of many billions of connected devices come true, and the standard proscribes how IPv6 should be used.

Warning: Hot air

There is a stern warning about security given in the form of the story of how 59 devices intended to monitor the performance of wind turbines were left with default user names and passwords. This led to them making 17,000 fraudulent calls, no doubt to premium rate numbers, incurring a bill of around €150,000.

Nick Hunn of Wifore Consulting, who has been working with the "Internet of Things" since before it was called Machine 2 Machine, describes the report as being for the “Posh Internet of Things”.

Hunn comments: “Everything in it is utterly sensible, but they are good design principles designed to protect a network which isn’t suitable for it.” Hunn says the GSMA is “ignoring a lot of what the IoT community wants to make, and that IoT needs very different technologies and that is not anywhere on the 3GPP roadmap”.

He believes that IoT is distinguished from M2M in part by the volume and bandwidth and in part by the way you handle the data.

Hunn remarks: “IoT is about M2M learning; it is M2M plus data science”, by which he means data mining with finesse. Hunn claims “we need a low power WAN solution which can be integrated into existing networks” – which is precisely what Cambridge Internet of Things pioneer Neul (recently acquired by Huawei) does.

With the Internet of Things being all things to all, er, things, the standards are bound to be pretty grey, but if one assumes that the connection is cellular (and even the GSMA document does not), this is a good place to start. ®

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