Standards bodies
No single body owns machine-to-machine technology. The radio, the transport, the application protocol and the SIM are each standardised somewhere else, which is why a working device usually implements documents from four or five of these organisations at once.
| Body | What it contributes |
|---|---|
| 3GPP | The cellular standards themselves. Release 13 (2016) introduced LTE-M and NB-IoT; Release 17 (2022) added RedCap and non-terrestrial networks. |
| ETSI | European standards institute and a founding partner of oneM2M. Its SmartM2M committee publishes the SAREF ontologies. |
| oneM2M | Founded in 2012 by seven regional standards bodies — ARIB and TTC (Japan), ATIS and TIA (United States), CCSA (China), ETSI (Europe) and TTA (Korea) — joined by TSDSI (India) in 2015. Defines a common service layer; Release 1 was published in 2015. |
| IETF | CoAP, 6LoWPAN, DTLS, OSCORE and the SUIT firmware-update architecture all come from IETF working groups. |
| OMA SpecWorks | Formed in 2018 when the Open Mobile Alliance merged with the IPSO Alliance. Maintains LwM2M and its object registry. |
| GSMA | Remote SIM provisioning: SGP.02 for M2M (from 2013), SGP.22 for consumer devices, and SGP.32 for IoT (2023). |
| IEEE | 802.15.4 is the radio under Zigbee and Thread; 802.11ah is Wi-Fi HaLow. |
| LoRa Alliance | Founded in 2015; maintains LoRaWAN, which the ITU approved as Recommendation Y.4480 in 2021. |
| OASIS | Home of the MQTT and AMQP specifications. |
| ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41 | The joint committee for the Internet of Things and digital twin; publishes the ISO/IEC 30141 reference architecture. |
| Connectivity Standards Alliance | Formerly the Zigbee Alliance. Maintains Zigbee and Matter. |
Why oneM2M exists
By 2012 each industry was building its own platform: one for smart meters, another for cars, another for health devices, each with its own way of registering a device, storing its data and controlling access. oneM2M was set up to define that common service layer once, independent of the network underneath. Its specifications are also published by the ITU as the Y.4500 series.