Due to their commercial and technical positioning operators have a natural role in Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. This is justified, among other factors, by their proximity to end users and direct control and ownership of backbone infrastructures. The next few years will be crucial to position on this emerging communications market. Many operators are still standing at the sidelines or enjoy benefiting from temporary revenue increase on fixed or mobile accesses brought in by external initiatives. Others are rapidly adopting this new opportunity and prepare to reap the benefits by structuring their business in a proactive approach. Some analysts now believe in a market of 40 billion Euro for devices and service in Europe alone by 2008.

In early 2006 the M2M communications market is focused on vehicular, security and also industrial applications. The opportunities that are currently being pursued by manufacturers and provider companies are centred on add-on or embedded communication modules. The most commonly supported applications are telemetry, fleet management and mobile computing. Some of the typical applications include; Security and Tracking, remote Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), Vending Machines, both Home and Industrial Automation, Road Traffic Information, Traffic Control Systems, Advertising, Telemedicine and Supply Chain Management (SCM).

While related technologies gradually stabilise with the addition of new short range communication standards such as ZigBee, advanced RFID technology, and open service platforms become more common, an increased number of actors become involved and business environment get more complex. Technology will bring new conceptual shifts from device interworking to service and domain interworking as it will be the case e.g. for pervasive services. This will pose new issues that require close analysis and more stringent requirements.

What are the main objectives of this Project?

• Get an update and overview of current technologies and market situation in M2M
• Update on trials, commercial services being deployed, business structuring with emphasis on current operator approaches
• Study service paradigms made possible by extensive use of M2M and their impact on service requirements
• Understand the impact and new requirements posed by M2M traffic, session management and signalling patterns on network infrastructures
• Analyse security requirements brought by wireless networking taking into account the power – encryption level dilemma
• Distinguish strategy options for short and medium time frames, depending on market constraints experienced by each operator
• Perspective technological changes (e.g. fixed - mobile convergence, circuit-switched to NGN etc.) and their impact on operator positioning and business models for M2M
• Evaluate whether M2M services have a natural evolution towards ubiquitous and pervasive services or if, on the contrary, the two things may have an independent evolution
• Propose possible approaches, from an operator’s point of view, towards M2M services and advanced service composition in the in the short, medium, and longer term