March 2025 - In this interview, Roland Hechwartner summarizes the latest developments from oneM2M’s 68th Technical Plenary. In addition to chairing oneM2M’s Technical Plenary (TP), Roland is responsible for the coordination of the overall management of the technical work within the TP and its Working Groups (WGs). He is also a representative of Deutsche Telekom (DT).
Q: Would you begin with an overview of the key developments at TP#68?
RH: In the week of 10 to 14 February, TP#68 took place as a hybrid event, with in-person sessions hosted by TSDSI and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi).
There was a mix of activities at TP#68, some oriented towards technical topics and others addressing adoption and knowledge sharing. There was, for example, a new work item at the intersection of IoT and robotics. And, with the ratification, we also formally started the publication process for Release 4 of oneM2M’s technical specifications by its organizational Partners. This is an important step in setting a global baseline with our regional standardization partners.
Taking advantage of the gathering in New Delhi, TSDSI organized a Stakeholders’ Day conference which allowed us to devote a full day to exchange views about market developments, oneM2M capabilities and roadmap, and to explore new requirements on the IoT development roadmap.
Q: Let us begin with the robotics development, which is an important topic in the context of industrial applications?
RH: During the opening plenary, KETI (Korea Electronics Technology Institute) presented a new work item on oneM2M-ROS (Robot Operating System) Interworking. KETI’s proposal had the support of other oneM2M members including Sejong University, Exacta, Deutsche Telekom, and the EU’s SBS (Small Business Standards).
As you know, robots have various sensors to collect real-time data and execute actions. A ROS serves as the middleware for robot control and operations. It minimizes hardware dependencies and simplifies the integration of complex sensors and control devices. As with any system, there are opportunities and benefits to sharing data and robot resources with external systems, including IoT platforms. The combination of ROS with oneM2M enables the standardization of data flow between IoT and robotic systems. For these reasons, interworking the oneM2M system with the ROS middleware offers significant advantages for IoT services involving robotics in domains such as smart factories and smart homes.
KETI’s proposed Work Item aims to study candidate solutions for oneM2M and ROS interworking. There is an initial table of contents for the initiative. This includes: a technical overview of ROS; analyses of interworking scenarios for ROS based robots with oneM2M applications; a derivation of interworking procedures with resource mappings; and the identification of any additional requirements to oneM2M supporting such interworking solutions. Our planning assumption is to finalize this information in a technical report (TR) in Q2 2026.
Q: You noted the ratification of Release 4. Would you explain the importance of that formality?
RH: The oneM2M Partnership Agreement, signed by oneM2M’s organisational Partners includes a commitment to “Convert/transpose/publish all relevant Technical Specifications and Technical Reports resulting from the work in oneM2M into its own relevant deliverables through its normal processes.” The ratification of a release starts this formal step with the decision by the Technical Plenary. A deliverable or a set of deliverables, in the case of a Release, is made available to the Partners for publication.
During the TP#68 closing plenary session, members approved oneM2M’s Release 4 control document. This document lists the versions which comprise the Release 4 documents (i.e., Technical Report and Technical Specifications) to be published by the organizational Partners as their regional standard. This is an important trigger for our Partner SDOs to disseminate the standard in their regions and is a development that has been welcomed in India as part of its national adoption strategy of oneM2M.
Q: From oneM2M’s LinkedIn interactions, it seems that the Stakeholder Day conference was a widespread success. Would you summarize your impressions of the event?
RH: Yes, the 12 February event was widely attended. Participants involved India’s oneM2M and IoT stakeholder’s including representatives from the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), the TSDSI, organizations from industry and academia as well as from ITU-T SG20, Nepal Telecom and delegates to oneM2M.
From a practical standpoint, there were poster sessions and live demonstrations of oneM2M based IoT implementations in India. Eleven companies from India presented their solutions, complementing five technical sessions. The latter covered:
- insights on the IoT/M2M Deployment scenarios & possibilities in the context of oneM2M from the Indian as well as the international perspective;
- spotlights on the global data standards landscape perspective, with contributions from India, Europe, Korea, IEEE and oneM2M;
- oneM2M’s engagement with academia and start-ups, with presentations from INRIA (France), IIIT Hyderabad and the recent oneM2M Hackathon;
- highlights of the oneM2M open interworking capabilities which support interoperability across verticals;
- a very good discussion on the urgency of the conformance and compliance certification demands in India to support their IoT ecosystem by a oneM2M testing and certification infrastructure and regime.
I know that TSDSI plan to publish a more detailed description and links to the information discussed at the event. Readers should watch for updates on oneM2M.org and our media channels.
Q: In addition to these activities, what were the main developments in the oneM2M Working Groups?
RH: The Requirements & Domain Models (RDM) working group, chaired by Massimo Vanetti (SBS), focused on the work on release 5. The main area of progress was on the TS-0023 document which deals with SDT (smart device template) based Information Model & Mapping for Vertical Industries.
Peter Niblett (IBM) chaired the System Design & Security (SDS) working group. In their sessions, members agreed changes to several documents, notably TS-0001 Functional Architecture, TS-0003 Security Solutions, TS-0004 Service Layer Core Protocol, and TS-0008 CoAP Protocol Binding. Some of these were corrections to Release 4 but most were inputs to Release 5. There was also some progress on TR-0077 (Integrating NGSI-LD API) which describes the different approaches towards integration with oneM2M.
The final working group, Testing & Developers Ecosystem (TDE), was chaired by Bob Flynn, Exacta. There, members agreed on new baseline documents of technical specifications. These include the new Release 2, Release 3, and Release 4 versions of the TS-0019 entitled ‘Abstract Test Suite & Implementation eXtra information for Test’ as well as the Release 4 version of the TS-0018 entitled ‘Test Suite Structure & Test Purposes’.
In addition, the WG continued progress and made enhancements to the ‘git’ process which automates certain aspects of our document management process. I described this initiative in my summary of TP#64.
Finally, the group discussed and reviewed results from the oneM2M International Hackathon event that began on 14 October and concluded with an Award Ceremony on 13 December 2024. There were fourteen teams from five countries with over fifty participants.
Q: In closing, what are the plans for the coming TPs?
RH: The next Technical Plenary TP#69 will be hosted by KETI and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Jeju, South Korea. This is scheduled from March 31 to April 4, 2025.
