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14th February, 2022

Lightweight M2M - Device Management and Service Enablement for the Internet of Things

by Friedhelm Rodermund

As this internet of things grows across all sectors from the manufacturing industry to transportation, utilities, smart city and public safety, consumer devices and healthcare, so will the need and complexity for all of these devices to be remotely managed, whether they are being reminded to transmit and process data, or are under maintenance and undergoing upgrades.

To be able to standardise these processes, Lightweight M2M or LwM2M, has been created a few years back and is already widely adopted across various industries. This IoT standard acts as a communications protocol between LwM2M software clients embedded on a range of IoT devices and their IoT management platforms. The term “lightweight” has been inspired by the deliberate design to make such a protocol simplistic, so that

the amount of data transferred between the devices and management platforms is as small as possible and can work on any connection speed. LwM2M has been developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA - now OMASpecWorks), which includes a team of experts from system, software and service providers, and industry verticals.

Device Management and Service Enablement

The design goal of LwM2M was to create a mechanism that is not only suitable for powerful computing devices such as smartphones but in particular caters to the needs of more constrained IoT devices, such as those that run a lifetime on a single battery or that need to be very low cost. Furthermore, LwM2M not only supports device management e.g. firmware updates, connectivity management and trouble shooting but also provides the means to enable entire IoT services such as the configuration of meter readings, or, remote controlling of the streetlights of an entire city.

LWM2M has been evolved further over recent years (latest standard version 1.2) to cater for requirements stemming from its significant industry adoption. E.g. today it not only runs on CoAP over UDP but may also be run on CoAP over TCP, LoRaWAN, or, cellular IoT (e.g. NB-IoT or Cat-M). Additionally, HTTP or MQTT may also be used to carry the LwM2M operations and data. Last but not least the required extensions to manage 5G New Radio connectivity have been added. 

Commercial Benefits

Using a standard such as LwM2M for IoT device management and IoT services has obvious benefits over proprietary solutions in terms of cost and time to market. Standards such as Lightweight M2M will be the key to unlock the real potential of IoT communications, enabling plug&play and move towards the often-predicted prospering market with immeasurable compelling services offered by billions of devices.

We at IOTECC have been involved in the creation and development of LwM2M from its beginning. Please contact us to get introduced to LwM2M, or, to get advice and support on how to leverage LwM2M for your IoT products and services. 

Stay tuned for further articles on IoT and LwM2M!