IoT deployment means installing fleet of low power hardware to all over your locations – efficient operations need great device management tools. You might want to install battery powered sensors and keep them running as long as possible. In some cases the hardware cost erosion offers huge benefits over time as long as there’s vibrant competition on the prices. You might have a great idea around IoT, but just not sure how to ensure proficient device management, long battery life and prevent the vendor lock?
How to connect our IoT hardware to cloud?
We started LwM2M the hard way: We’ve been building our own NB-IoT platform RAZR for some time now. The underlying idea with RAZR is to help customers to try out new NB-IoT ideas in real life as fast as possible. NB-IoT is rather new technology – low power, narrowband and recently released on top of 4G LTE networks – no always-on connection to network anymore. No HTTP but CoAP protocol. But there are clear advantages over the older connectivity technologies – less power hungry, comes with cheaper components and offers great coverage.
The best way to start toying with NB-IoT ideas are agile experiments. To speed up these experimental projects we designed own platform RAZR. Soon, it became clear that low power hardware is not enough to get batteries last longer. How much signalling, data bytes and device management messages are transferred matters as well – amount of transferred data should be as small as possible. Legacy device management solutions seemed to be designed for devices which run with big battery or are connected to a power plant! So we were asking the very same questions I mentioned.
LwM2M came into picture
After technology reviews, the decision was to make RAZR LwM2M compatible. LwM2M is a protocol from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). It is designed specifically constrained IoT devices in mind and it is many times more efficient to run than earlier device management solutions. Another great thing is that defines methods for device management, data transfer pipeline and E2E security at once. As an open, widely embraced standard, it would be great for the customers too. They won’t end up in vendor lock with their early IoT experiments.
After evaluating several open source solutions we created embedded SW and cloud software stack with LwM2M integrated with full of potential. The plan seem to be working. LwM2M and efficient hardware-software integration and has helped us to complete several RAZR NB-IoT pilot projects for our customers.
And even more interestingly, we have already integrated our LwM2M software in our customers’ core products and back-end. They’ll be ready with their IoT products already this year.
If you consider mowing towards LwM2M or building IoT fleet, I’m confident to say, that we are the experts to help with any LwM2M solution!