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IoT/M2MIWG/Roadmap
Contents
M2M Industry Working Group - Proposed V1 Roadmap
Background and Purpose
The M2M IWG recognizes that there are a large number of M2M solution domains, in many industries, poised for rapid growth. That growth, fueled by increasing wireless bandwidth, and expanded connectivity, will also bring new opportunities to bridge physical world events from sensors, actuators and other types of devices, into Enterprise and Web applications.
Market growth is hindered by incompatible platforms and protocols that require developers to continually reinvent solutions that have already been created. Sensor and other device data is often sequestered in dedicated M2M systems, and not readily accessible by other applications and systems. This situation slows innovation and creates maintenance and upgrade problems as deployments evolve over time. The Industry Working Group believes the creation of open tools, open protocols, open interfaces and open APIs is the best approach to addressing these problems, bringing tremendous value to the M2M ecosystem.
The purpose of this roadmap is to provide guidance and visibility for the near and long term direction of M2M related initiatives in Eclipse. These initiatives are intended to increase industry momentum and foster collaboration among organizations, across many industries. They will include open source projects, reference architectures, frameworks, best practices and liaisons with other organizations and open communities. An important element of the roadmap is to lay out the goals, principles, architectural guidelines, and priorities that will be used to promote projects and broader community participation.
Basic Principles
- An Open Industry Working Group needs to encourage broad participation
- Open protocols and reference platforms work to breakdown implementation silos.
- Specific technical inhibitors to M2M market growth should be identified and, used to scope and prioritize projects and other initiatives. An initial list was created in the Charter. Inhibitors will be addressed through open source projects sponsored by the Eclipse open source community, its members and, through liaisons with other institutions, open source and standards organizations.
- The IWG should promote both a bottom-up and top-down approach to driving M2M open source projects. Clearly there will be technologies and components that M2M practitioners bring forward in support of these M2M open community goals. There also will be projects of broad and strategic value identified by the companies and organization sponsoring and collaborating with the Eclipse M2M IWG, which it will need to address.
- Architecture, frameworks, and samples/examples supporting the tooling and runtimes projects will be important for adoption and community growth
- The M2M working group will apply a typical “3-tier” reference architecture as described in the group’s charter, to provide context for tooling and runtime projects. System interfaces in the architecture will also drive the requirements for interoperability of M2M solutions with other application models M2M systems will integrate with.
- Effective levels of decoupling between devices, applications, servers and communication interfaces are important to interoperability and avoiding unnecessarily “brittle” M2M interface points.
Near Term Direction (12-18 months)
The first period of work will focus on basic open source projects, establishing the IWG, and building the community.
Initial project and architecture priority areas for the M2M IWG are:
- Application Tooling for M2M gateway including integration with M2M servers
- Promoting open interoperability between the M2M gateway and M2M server, and between M2M servers and servers supporting Web and Enterprise middleware and application models.
- Hacker place and sandbox to provide samples, examples, testing environments and support.
Deliverables/Milestones
- Face-to-face kick-off meeting
- Finalize and approve roadmap
- Identification of success criteria
- Develop checkpoint plan with Koneki and Paho projects
- Midpoint Executive checkpoint for Charter, Roadmap and overall progress
- Interoperability
- Define a model of gateway/server interactions
- Tools
- Define extension points of tools, leveraging the M2M model
- Drive the implementation of reference extensions (simulators, generators) in Koneki
- Drive V1 release of Koneki
- Open Communication and messaging protocols
- Set up server sandbox
- Identification of additional protocols and open interface points that should be addressed
- Drive V1 release of Paho
- Community building / Evangelism
- Promote broad, open participation to expand IWG membership, community, and adoption.
- Marketecture materials needed to communicate and promote the Eclipse M2M initiatives
- Set up hacker place
- (Liaisons with M2M standards groups and initiatives?)
- (Initial use cases/scenarios?)
- (Coordinate/drive the creation of new Eclipse projects when appropriate? e.g. embedded frameworks, server components...)
Future Direction (2-3 years)
Information about the physical world around us is poised for explosive growth. Open interfaces, programming models and tooling will be essential to realizing true potential of this information, enabling the next generation of information systems that can integrate people, places and things. The Eclipse M2M initiative will maintain a longer term outlook for the open community, needed to expand the volume and spectrum of information and intelligence into new, innovative systems and processes.
- Position with Internet-of-Things, with recommendations
- Refine reference architecture to cover future directions of Web, Enterprise and Social application integration and tooling integration
- Anticipated and future use cases/scenarios
- Provisioning, configuration and re-configuration of devices, device clients, and device gateways.
- Scalability issues that can be addressed by Eclipse open runtimes and tooling
Roadmap Process
Comments and feedback on this Roadmap are openly solicited and encouraged. All final revisions will be approved by the M2M IWG Steering Committee.
Subscription to the M2M IWG Mailing list is here: https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/m2m-iwg