M2M, the acronym for Machine-to-Machine Applications (or more aptly, Mobile to Machine and Machine to Mobile communications) is an emerging area in the field of telecom technologies.

With traditional revenue streams like Voice getting saturated in most markets around the world, M2M holds the promise of generating new avenues for revenue generation. M2M allows a wide variety of machines to become nodes of personal wireless networks, and provides to develop monitoring and remote control applications. This will decrease costs for involved human resources and will make machines more intelligent and autonomous.
The broad spectrum of M2M communication includes various innovative channels like intelligent remote control of machine parts (telematics) to remote reading of electric meters (telemetry). The definition of M2M in the mobile space is, “Machines” using network resources to communicate with remote application infrastructure for the purposes of monitoring and control, either of the “machine” itself, or of the surrounding environment. Thus M2M doesn’t simply create a passive data collection point but an intelligent inter-machine co-ordination ecosystem.



M2M Gateways:

The Gateway module provides control and localization services for data collection. The gateways also double up in concentrating traffic to the operator’s core .It supports Bluetooth, Zig Bee, GPRS capabilities. It supports wireless communication standards like GSM/GPRS, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth/IEEE 802.15.1 (supports communication links between devices on short distances), ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 (used for low speed data transfer between low-power consumer devices).