OMA DM v1.x compliant lightweight device management for constrained M2M devices

Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA DM) specification is well established and is being widely used to manage mobile devices. However, the current OMA DM protocol (v1.2 and v1.3) is not suitable for constrained M2M devices operating in constrained networks. Therefore, new standards for M2M technology are being developed in order to sustain the exponential growth of M2M wireless communications market. The upcoming standardized lightweight protocols will not be compatible with the current OMA DM protocols. For this reason, this paper presents an alternative lightweight solution that is fully compatible with the current OMA DM protocol and with all existing OMA Management Objects (MOs) defined by OMA DM. A proxy adapter is used to convert OMA DM SyncML based messages to or from the ELFOMA (Exalted Lightweight For OMA DM v1.x) lightweight messages. This solution aims to enable operators and service providers to leverage their existing OMA DM servers (already managing over a billion mobile devices) to continue supporting former OMA DM enabled mobile devices and to incrementally support new constrained M2M devices through the added proxy server. Using ELFOMA, the size of OMA DM messages can be reduced by 85%. Other encoding schemes such as EXI and WBXML are also compared. Copyright c © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ∗Correspondence Nhon Chu, Sierra Wireless France, 5 bd Gallieni, 92442 Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. E-mail: [email protected]