Technologies and challenges in developing Machine-to-Machine applications: A survey

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is evolving day by day and expected to create an ecosystem of billions of electronic devices. This new class of communicating devices have very diverse traffic characteristics and pose unique challenges. The essence of this paper is to provide a survey of state-of-the-art communication technologies, architectures and development platforms, and explore their potential to support the growth of M2M applications. Thus, we review the networking techniques including wide area networks, grasping LTE, NB-IoT, EC-GSM-IoT, 5G, and other proprietary networks including SigFox, Lora, and Weightless. Furthermore the short-range capillary networks are also reviewed according to the facilities they provide for application development. Available application development protocols, cloud platforms, open source frameworks and middleware frameworks are discussed for facilitating M2M application development process. Altogether the investigation provides a broad perspective to a user for application development choices. In each section and in the end current challenges are discussed for future research work.