First meeting of Focus Group to create a common M2M service layer, 17-18 April

ITU’s new Focus Group on the Machine-to-Machine service layer (FG M2M) will meet for the first time at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, 17-18 April 2012. M2M service layer standards will act as important catalysts for the market’s growth, and an earlier newslog announcement of FG M2M’s formation has attracted the interest of an array of M2M-focused organizations, both within and outside ITU’s membership. See FG M2M’s homepage here.

The M2M market is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years and, as part of the more broadly-defined Internet of Things (see ITU’s JCA-IoT), will encompass a wide variety of industry sectors. Some forecasts predict that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

Considering the wide range of M2M’s possible applications – enabling services across vertical markets including healthcare, logistics, transport, utilities and countless others – this prediction may hold true; but certainly not without the interoperability enabled by global ICT standards. A common M2M service layer, agreed at the international level by stakeholders in the M2M and relevant vertical markets, will provide a cost-efficient platform able to be easily deployed in hardware and software, in a multi-vendor environment, across industry sectors.

FG M2M will identify a minimum set of requirements common to vertical markets, and thereby create the knowledge-base needed to begin the development of open, international ITU standards. In analyzing the requirements of vertical markets, the group will initially focus on the healthcare market by investigating application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols supporting e-health applications and services.

The deadline for submission of input documents is 10 April, and the meeting is open to all interested parties from ITU Member States. Registration for both on-site and remote participation is available at http://www.itu.int/reg/tsg/3000361.