By 2020, it is expected that 33 Billion devices will be connected to the internet, which means that every person in the world is equipped with four connected devices. In order to support this huge number of devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) is presented as the main infrastructure for the coexistence of those devices. However, IoT is still challenged by many issues including security, increasing complexity, power management, network misalignment, and vertical fragmentation. Focusing on this latter challenge, the existing IoT solutions are generally vendor-specific, lacking interoperability, and come with a big semantic gap. Indeed, the current IoT marketplace is extremely fragmented, which has increased the R&D cost in each specific domain. Therefore, the current Machine-to-Machine (M2M) silo model is not an efficient way to communicate and thus represents a barrier to further development. Moreover, many vertical M2M solutions have been designed independently and separately for different applications, which impedes large-scale M2M deployment.
In order to address the above challenges, 143 organizations around the world have been involved in M2M standardization according to the Global Standards Collaboration M2M Task Force. This consortium aims at developing a horizontal platform in order to move from a highly fragmented market with small vendor-specific applications where each silo contains its own technologies without interoperability to an End-to-end platform coming with (i) common service capabilities layer, (ii) Interoperability at the level of communications and data, and (iii) seamless interaction between heterogeneous applications and devices. To this end, oneM2M has been developed by over 200 member organizations as an open source implemented horizontal platform addressing IoT needs.