Typical device management standards

- [Teacher] Remote management of devices was a difficult task often implemented in the proprietary solutions. Therefore, we often need some standard ways and technologies to accomplish some common tasks, such as using a communication protocol to handle interactions between DM entities, encoding the messages and utilizing a data model and applying a procedural flow for management operations.

A DM standard can ensure interoperability and a compatibility across platforms and conditions. It can also involve independently from specific DM technologies. A DM standard defines the standard ways and technologies for DM purposes. Here are some existing DM standards for mobile devices, network devices and IoT. However, when it comes to the IoT, we need to make sure the protocols can work in some conditions, such as, support for flexible deployments and the scale, efficient communications and execution on constraint devices and networks, support for various security options, able to integrate into other DM solutions and technologies as well as its applicability in a broad range of industry segments.

Here, I'll introduce some typical device management standards. At first, let's look at the TR-069 standard. TR-069 is the technical specification that defines the CPE white air network management protocol called CWMP by the Broadband Forum. TR-069 originally targeted the broadband market. It emits the management needs of internet access devices, such as gateways, routers, femto cells and LAN devices, generally called TR-069 CPE.

CWMP defines a mechanism that it compasses a secure auto-configuration of a CPE and also incorporates other CPE management functions into a common framework. The first version of TR-069 was published in 2004 and current version 1.4 was published in 2014. CWMP provides some primary functionalities such as auto-configuration and dynamic service provisioning, firmware image management, software module management, status and performance monitoring and diagnostics.

From the protocol architecture point-of-view, the CWMP protocol uses remote procedure call methods on top of HTTP or HTTPs and SOAP. A standard XML based syntax used to encode remote procedure calls. CWMP uses HTTP and TLS to secure communications between a CPE and auto-configuration server, called ACS. For confidentiality and authentication, there are other specifications defined around TR-069, such as data model of managative objects for network devices or services.

Where you can check the broadband forum website for more detail. OMA device management or OMA DM is device management protocol for mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablets. It defines various management procedures and the interface between the OMA DM server and the clients, which are managed devices. The first version of OMA DM dated back to 2003 and the current version is 2.0, published in 2016.

The OMA DM is platform neutral, so it can run on many platforms, including the mobile device management solution on Windows 10. Compare it with earlier versions, OMA DM 2.0 is significantly enhanced in terms of reduced complexity, enhanced interactivity and cost efficiency. The primary functionalities of OMA DM include setting initial configuration information. For example, provision, installation and updates of persistent information.

For example, firmware updates. Retrieval of management information from devices including the retrieval of technology seeking information from devices and processing, events and alarms generated by devices. OMA DM is transport agnostic and uses the data transport mechanisms over HTTP, WAP, SMS, et cetera. OMA DM 2.0 utilizes a RESTful HTTP-based architecture providing a transaction model and a data model for manipulating so-called management objects instead of entities that can be manipulated by management actions over the OMA DM protocol.

OMA DM 2.0 is not backward compatible with OMA DM 1.X, but if management objects for OMA DM 1.X can still be used in OMA DM 2.0. We've seen that TR-069 and OMA DM have target applications in internet access devices and mobile devices. Although, they may be used in IoT devices, like gateways in general, the features are heavy weight and can not be (mumbles) well the broad spectrum of IoT devices.

Therefore, there are a couple of DM standards used in IoT or M2M, which are OMA LightweightM2M and oneM2M standards. They're comparatively new standards. OMA LightweightM2M is a restful IoTF co-op based protocol using the data model called LightweightM2M object, mini-targeting the resource constraint M2M devices. The protocol can still be running on regular M2M devices, but with more efficiency in terms of messaging and management objects.

The improved version 1.0 was released in early 2017. oneM2M is known as the standard for IoT and defines common application layered frameworks for enabling common services including device management. This first release was done in 2015 and the current release two was done in 2016. We've only briefly introduced these LightweightM2M and oneM2M standards here as we'll talk about them in more detail.