Autonomous decentralised M2M Application Service Provision

Abstract

Machine-to-Machine Communication (M2M) service platforms integrate M2M devices and enable realisation of applications using the M2M devices to support processes, mostly in the business domain. Many application-specific vertical implementations of M2M service platforms exist as well as efforts to define horizontal M2M service platforms. Both approaches usually have central components or stakeholders of which the entire M2M system or the user depends. With regards to the end-user, more and more M2M devices provide resources, such as environmental information (e.g. energy consumption data) or control options (e.g. switching energy consumer). These resources offer great potential for supporting smart environments and it would be advantageous if these resources could be used by end-users to create individual smart environments or be accessible for other users to integrate these resources into their processes. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to avoid centralised or domain-specific solutions in order to realise flexible and independent M2M service platforms. This thesis proposes a novel framework for autonomous and decentralised M2M application service provision based on native end-user integration and a distributed M2M system architecture. In order to actively involve end-users in M2M application development, an intuitive methodology for graphical application design through state machine-based application modelling is proposed. To achieve independence from the execution environments, a formal language for modelling M2M applications is introduced enabling a graphically designed M2M application to be represented by a formally described application model, which can be processed automatically and platform-independently. The design of a generalised interface definition enables local M2M applications to be provided as a service to other users. Based on this, an approach is introduced allowing end-users to combine the resources available in their personal environments in order to realise cooperative M2M applications and act as service providers. The M2M service platform architecture presented does not contain any central components or stakeholders. The distributive nature of central entities and stakeholders is realised by a decentralised system architecture being implemented in the end-user domain. The various M2M service providers and consumers link via a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network on both the communication level (using communication protocols Constrained Application Protocol, CoAP or Session Initiation Protocol, SIP) and on the data storage level (using structured or unstructured P2P overlay networks). An M2M Community concept complements the P2P network to enable a social network between different M2M service providers and consumers. The thesis also presents a prototypical proof-of-concept implementation used to verify the proposed framework components.