The Age of Machine-to-Machine Communication

Skynet

Ever Imagined a world where your Washing Machine communicates with your Home Sound System and adjusts the noise level of the washer accordingly? Ever Imagined a world where your car interacts with your rice cooker and sends signals to automatically turn the shit on, a world where your thermostat interacts with your door and adjusts the temperature sensing your arrival as per your needs? Well, whatever you can imagine of, the most bizarre thing you can dream of in the world of Technology, is today being made possible, being converted to reality!! And, most of us have now become familiar with that technical term thats making it all happen- IoE (Internet of Everything) or Internet of Things as some like to call it. The Internet of Things is an extremely wide field, that is revolutionizing the way we live, and the entire wireless communication industry. In this blog though, I will touch only a small portion(which in itself is another world) of the IoT- M2M: that is Machine-to-Machine Communication. Check out this video to see a day in the World of IoT

Delving around the Off-shores of M2M

In the 'Terminator', Skynet, a Global Intelligent Machine with Sensors everywhere tries to destroy mankind. Or take the 'Iron Man 3' for an analogy,  in which our hero Tony Stark builds an advanced mechanism where-in too many Iron Mans(ya, that may not be absolutely correct to say) come into existence each one communicating with each other, trying to save the world. Or lets get down the local lane may be, take for example Rajnikanth's 'Robot' where in the climax scene different bots start communicating with each other and forming different structures. In our analysis, it doesn't really matter whether who is good or bad- whats important is the use of sensors and communication across machines. These were simply examples of 'machines'. Well, machine-to-machine communication is not about, or should I say, not just about such machines! It deals with even the smallest of devices you see around. Then what is it? Let us give it a try to understand Machine-to-Machine Communication from the scratch. As the name suggests- Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is a form of data communication that involves one or more entities that do not necessarily require human interaction or intervention in the process of communication. M2M is also named as Machine Type Communication (MTC) in 3GPP (Telecommunications Standard Specification).

Advanced Smart City Framework. Source: Google

As we can see above, it is an extremely elaborate pictorial representation of the advanced Smart Cities that involve Smart Grids, Satellite Communication, Travel, Safety etc and all is made possible by Machine-2-Machine Communication whereby, through a system of sensors and actuators, and a highly sophisticated data processing and storage centre, the information is finally dissipated via WLAN and other relevant broadband technologies. Ok so, how does the entire shit work? I mean, all this sounds pretty cool, the world being made automatic, and sensory, the things getting connected to each other, each device having its own IP address, life becoming technically advanced, but then this question keeps hovering- HOW!!! Lets give it a shot to try and answer that in as short as possible:

Sensors and Communication protocols- yes, they come across the first and foremost requirements for M2M. Lets explain the enitre process with an example. From those mentioned above and from many infinite possible scenarios, I chose a simple scenario where-in the  car sends a signal to the Air-conditioner in the room to turn the temperature on to an optimum level given the distance left for the owner to arrive home. So, the Air Conditioner has some inbuilt Wi-fi chip within it that takes care of the reception of the signals. The Car has a sensor that given the distance left to reach the target place- in this example which is home and on the basis of machine learning given the speed variation patterns of the driver(owner), judges the approximate time to reach home. Then, when a certain threshold of arrival is crossed over, the sensors send a signal to the Air-conditioner in the room to  turn on and set to the desired level according to the climatic conditons. This way, the extra time that the Air-Conditioner takes to set up the proper weather inside, is saved. This is a very basic example of M2M, and should not be confused with the infinite possibilities it offers, and the immense processing involved in most cases including support from Cloud services, servers, advanced wireless communication technologies, Gateways etc. Shall take a delve down each one in separate blogs.

The Transforming Market of Wireless Communication and Devices

So, what does the above example need, whats the cost and how is the industry behaving like? 

The numbers are staggering! And trust me on this, like the population of India is only a rough estimate of sorts and involves a huge extrapolation, the same is with this market. It is expected that around 20 billion connected devices is going to come into existence by 2020. Holy Moly! Now you compare that number with the existing mobile subscribers- around some 5 billion. So, the industry that has been evolving since years, has given birth to giants like Vodafone, Qualcomm, Samsung- yes we all- the entire telecommunication industry and the chip world, is on the verge of a turn-around. And, its not a days process- like Rome. Its happening already!  Check out some of the amazing examples from the world's leading industries:

1. GE Jet engines have been there for decades I guess. But its evolving rapidly in the past few years with the new variety having sensors that send the entire information related to the plane and the engine to the servers including the pressure, landing time, required servicing etc.

2. GM have built an embedded automatically notifying system in their cars that in case of accidents, sends messages across to ambulances and hospitals.

3. Google, which recently bought 'Nest' has put in billions of dollars in home automation, like many other giants.

4. Cisco has already made the Smart Parking implement in some parts of US

5. Cities like Barcelona have been declared as 'Smart Cities' with everything connected- from transportation to medical facilities

6. Startups evolving on this industry like one involving a friend of mine, whose startup is based on IoT for Transportation with automatic carrier vehicle guide, track and stop mechanism.

This is an extremely exhaustive line-up but I will cu it to this space for now. This was just relating to the device manufacturers. With this, the chip manufacturing world is also to see a big change. For example, Qualcomm plans to design special WI-Fi chips for the purpose. And why not! An additional such chip would cost around only a few dollars inside the AC example that we discussed earlier. And, if spending that much gives the AC manufacturer a lable of  'Smart AC' and allows him to know about the complete working conditions form anywhere, the log tables, analysis, then why not! The opportunities are massive. If you need something to be automated, to be connected, you need to design relevant wireless chips. Then, the need to have a GUI arises, a display and there in comes the DSP chip. Todays world demands high resolution in everything and so the technical demands shoot up. A big market space, henceforth!

This is just the forecast for Consumer electronics alone! Source: Machina Research

Finally, the advanced LTE-A for M2M:

Long Term Evolution's new release- LTE-Advanced is meant for solving a lot of connectivity issues for the Machine Type Communication. As 3GPP defines it, this release, Rel-13 has a lot of improved specifications for the M2M. A detail analysis on this would also require another article. So sometime later. In LTE-Advanced focus is on higher capacity: The driving force to further develop LTE towards LTE–A - LTE Release10 was to provide higher bitrates in a cost efficient way and, at the
same time, completely fulfil the requirements set by ITU for IMT Advanced, also referred to as 4G: a) Increased peak data rate,
b) DL 3 Gbps, UL 1.5 Gbps Higher spectral efficiency, from a maximum of 16bps/Hz in R8 to 30 bps/Hz in R10.
c) Increased number of simultaneously active subscribers.
d) Improved performance at cell edges, e.g. for DL 2x2 MIMO at least 2.40 bps/Hz/cell.
The main goal of LTEAdvanced is to provide the IMT-Advanced functionality while retaining backward compatibility with current LTE user equipment that subscribers own. When a large number of machine-to-machine (M2M) devices are trying to access the network simultaneously, it leads to a low random access (RA) successful rate and high congestion problem, which may cause the waste of radio resources, packet loss, latency, extra power consumption, and the worst, M2M service error. With a potential market of probably 50 million connected devices, M2M offers tremendous opportunities as well as unique challenges.  Again, how did all this happen and the transformation of the entire market from 1G to 4G, or should I say 5G, we'll cover that in the next blog may be.

The most important thing that concerns everyone in this regard in security. A lot of Wireless Mesh Protocols like CBM-HWMP, are though good enough but need lots of improvement. This entire new technical world that involves the cloud and the IoT, is facing this very major problem to tackle. But then again, M2M, given the immense scope it has, in different fields like, Healthcare, Vehicle-2-Vehicle Communication, Bridge Health Monitoring, Transportation and Logistics, Security and all this in real-time, advancements in all fields are at a rapid progress. The world is transforming, the industry is revolutionizing.

P.S: Feel free to share all your views. This afterall is not coming from an established technical industrialist, but just from another student in an engineering college trying to get that Btech degree in Electronics Engineering :P