IoT device management protocols: LwM2M, OMA-DM and TR-069

One of the main referred IoT (Internet of Things) challenges in the industrial data ingestion which solutions seemed yesterday to be Big Data and today the “Edge” pre-processing. One of the greatest problems that companies are currently facing while deploying IoT devices is their management.

Why? Nowadays each manufacturer uses their own management software, their “ecosystem”. Only trough this software is possible to maintain and monitor all the devices: software/firmware updates, remote configuration, etc. The key is to use device which implement standard protocols or tools like Muutech platform providing the ability to interact with the management platform of other providers, being able to keep using the same non-standard IoT devices of different brands in combination with devices using standard protocols, avoiding vendor-locking.

The standard protocol with the most impact in IoT is MQTT (and its variant MQTT-SN) since is light, robust and overhead-less. It works with in a subscription-publish model, very similar in concept as a lot of chat tools. This protocol is oriented to communication, but it lacks of a native IoT Device Management feature, although in some platforms we can see a management protocol build on top of MQTT, like in IBM Watson IoT Platform: https://console.bluemix.net/

To cover this standardization necessity we can find some protocols:

• OMA Lightweight M2M (LwM2M), built by the Open Mobile Alliance, is a light, fast and structured protocol, ideal for low-capacity devices.
• OMA-DM, also built by the Open Mobile Alliance, but more oriented to mobile applications. Ideal for things in movement (changing IP address for instance). More complex and structured tan LwM2M.
• • TR-069, created by the Broadband Form (its first version is from 2004) and used in hundreds of thousand of devices all over the world, being a protocol widely used by telecommunication operators to provision their routers, etc. For this, is very complex, heavy and structured, but it works very well for gateways and telecommunications devices. As a curiosity, only a few TR069 products are certified: http://www.broadband-forum.org/implementation/certified-products/tr-069-certified-products After some years of works, a new version, more IoT oriented has come to light: User Service Platform: https://usp.technology/ too recent and with few implementations.

In the next two tables (via https://walt-tech.com.au/) we can see a comparison:

As you may note, depending on the concrete application it will be more convenient to use on protocol or another, so we will need a central platform, from where multiple IoT architecture devices (sensors, gateways, etc.) from multiple manufacturers can be managed, always trying to reduce the setup time of each of these “things”.

In Muutech we are always working in adding new standard protocols to our product, not only focused on monitoring and control of your machines, sensors and IT infrastructure but also the provision and management of it from a unique platform.