As momentum builds around LPWAN solutions, including NB-IoT and LTE-M, it is expected to encourage high volumes of low price-point connected devices. The commercial success of these new devices will vary according to their efficiency in gathering and sharing IoT data. That said, however, by enabling interworking with LPWAN technologies from 3GPP, Release 3 will support operators in the deploying of cellular IoT services, bringing new revenue generating opportunities higher up the value chain.        

As oneM2M works to open up the IoT ecosystem, doing so will inevitably improve the business case for new services to be launched and, with the abstraction layer that Release 3 creates, the exchange of cross-silo date will be simplified. In addition to this, by supporting a set of 3GPP-defined APIs, it will highlight new revenue streams for mobile operators, reducing the cost of deployments at the same time.

Commercial success

Looking at an example in the smart home area, network operators will be dealing with networks of devices and appliances from a variety of manufacturers. A given home might have a home security system from one manufacturer, a smart thermostat from another, and still another supplying the family’s smart refrigerator. To address this challenge, oneM2M creates a standard API that facilitates control of all of these devices. The commercial success will depend on the efficiency of the approach taken for gathering and sharing data at scale. Similar models exist in the oneM2M standard for industrial and other applications.

The value of technologies lies not only in the technologies themselves, but in the capabilities they empower, the applications they enable, and the business and lifestyle possibilities they unlock. Some of the examples of cellular IoT value-added services enabled by oneM2M’s Release 3 include:

• IoT device enrollment to provide cellular IoT devices connected to an operator’s network with secure security credentials, authentication and registration;
• IoT device location tracking, which supports current location tracking, stores past device locations and generates notifications to IoT apps;
• the ability to manage data delivery based on schedule and priority of requests;
• network communication pattern configuration for operators to efficiently manage network resources in response to the anticipated communication patterns of IoT devices, according to input from IoT apps;   
• the ability to wake a sleeping device, to create almost a sixth sense edge for devices and enable extra benefits such as reduced battery wastage. 

The impact of Release 3 cannot be underestimated, as it will undoubtedly reveal significant new revenue streams for mobile operators while lowering the associated cost of deployment. Ways to monetize NB-IoT and LTE-M will be identified and, by taking a standardized approach at the service layer and removing the burden of understanding diverse LPWAN aspects, application proliferation will be simpler.

We will soon get to a place where everything works seamlessly together, where any endpoint of the IoT is at the developer’s disposal, and where any data source can be tied in. Then the possibilities will be limited only by the imagination.