Autonomic Services in M2M Networks
A2Nets is an European project funded by France in the context of ITEA 2 Eureka call 4 for the period: 2012-2014. The consortium is composed of 23 partners from 4 countries (France, Finland, Spain, Turkey). The A2Nets ITEA 2 project took up the challenge of applying autonomic computing and communication paradigms to exploit the real power of IoT and M2M communications technologies to develop future Cyber-Physical Systems. By focusing on a horizontal M2M standard-based approach, the project consortium aimed to arrive at an industry-wide smart M2M service approach whereby autonomic computing reduces the amount of actions required from human users and performs autonomic actions in the higher abstraction level of the M2M system, enabling the interaction of applications that had not initially been intended for such purposes.
In concrete terms, the project generated a number of key innovations that all lay a real foundation for future exploitation. The architectural approach incorporated an M2M gateway and communication overlay concept with an M2M service platform along with trust and end-to-end security. Among the technology enhancements within the architectural approach were several innovation bricks, namely an autonomic M2M manager, ontology-based reasoning capability, IoT network virtualization, energy-efficient communication, Bluetooth low-energy and energy- efficient ipv6 multicast for firmware update. In terms of the project’s contributions to M2M business aspects, M2M service capabilities, security/trust and devices/service were all developed as a horizontal service.
The essential shift from vertical towards horizontal has been enabled by the horizontal M2M architecture approach and a set of its’ key building blocks, such as autonomic M2M (knowledge based) manager, ETSI-compliant service capability layer, XMPP based M2M messaging, related M2M gateways and interworking proxies capable of connecting embedded systems to back-ends, and means for trust creation to enable end to end security for M2M applications. The project has created a new model and prototype for end-to-end security management (dissociation of data distribution and trust) and remote LAN security management (including energy constrained LAN devices) as well a proposal for the MIM (Modular Identity Module) hardware design.
In A2Nets project, the contributions of the LISSI laboratory focus mainly on developing an ontology-based reasoning capability that can be added to any IoT platform compliant with the OneM2M standard.
The LISSI laboratory have developed also models for the management of M2M devices and M2M applications based on the Micro-concept language. These models have been used by the LISSI laboratory to validate the ontology-based reasoning capability in scenarios dealing with the control of ambient AAL environments.
