Читать книгу Fundamentals of IoT and Wearable Technology Design - Haider Raad - Страница 20

M2M describes the technology that enables the communication between two or more machines. With M2M, one could connect machines, devices, and appliances in a wired or wireless fashion via a variety of communications techniques to deliver services with limited human intervention.

The difference between machine to machine (M2M) and IoT can be confusing to many. In fact, the misconception that M2M and IoT are the same has been a continuing subject of debate in the realm of tech industry.

Both M2M and IoT are connectivity solutions that provide remote access to machine data. They both have the capability of exchanging information among machines without human intervention. Thus, the two terms have been mistakenly interchanged often. However, M2M is a predecessor to IoT and had revolutionized enterprise operations by enabling them to monitor and manage their machines and hardware components remotely. M2M set the underlying basis of machine connectivity on which IoT built upon. Nevertheless, IoT is the ultimate manifestation when it comes to connectivity.

Figure 1.3 Characteristics of wearable technology.

The main objective of M2M is to connect a machine/device to another machine (typically in an industrial setting) via cellular or wired network so that its status can be monitored and its data can be collected, remotely. IoT is more of a universal market technology that aims at serving consumers, industries, and enterprises. Consumer IoT connects users to their devices and enables remote access. On the other hand, enterprise and industrial IoT take it further by allowing tracking, control, and management.

IoT and M2M diverge immensely when it comes to the way they access devices remotely. M2M relies on point‐to‐point communications enabled by dedicated hardware components integrated within the machine. The communication among these connected machines is made possible via wired or conventional cellular network and dedicated software. IoT, on the other hand, typically uses IP networks and integrates web applications to interface device/machine data to a middleware, and in the majority of cases, to cloud.

It is worth noting that IoT is intrinsically more scalable than M2M since cloud‐based architectures do not need additional hard‐wired connections and subscriber identification modules (SIM) which are required in M2M.