Research and Development on Information and Communications Technology 40 Toward a Comprehensive Platform for IoT Applications in Vietnam Using Machine to Machine Communication Nguyen Tai Hung Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam hung.nguyentai@hust.edu.vn Abstract - The Internet of Things (IoT) applications like Home Automation (HA) or Smart Grid presents one of the biggest growth potential in the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication today. Thanks to M2M technologies’ advances recently, the sensors/actuators and smart meters are expected not only require human intervention in sensing environmental parameters, meter the energy/water consumption level and send them back to central platform for processing but also give out proper & automatic responses to the situation. However, there are still many challenges in designing communication protocols and platform to exchange and share of collected information and other various constrains such as the variety of end devices, real-time nature and extra-low power consumption. This article investigates on a number of existing communication protocols and platforms that can be adopted for M2M application development and deployment in Vietnam conditions. Keywords: M2M; IoT; M2M platform; M2M Protocols; API; Home Automation. I. INTRODUCTION In the most basic sense, M2M is a technology of the future, where a smart device will interact and communicate via a communications network. In order to function, each device must be outfitted with a communication module, and in many cases a sensor, for data collection. With numerous advances in wireless communication and in the base-band processing technologies, these devices can be easily placed in diverse locations, far away from one another, or form a central system through various access network technologies, like xDSL, Satellite, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS or Wi-Fi. In general M2M communication often refers to a system of remote sensors, middleware, software and applications that are continuously transmitting data to a central system. The main goal of M2M communications is to enable sharing of information between electronic systems autonomously. However, despite its real- time application and lots of benefits, research in M2M communication is still in its infancy, and faces many technical challenges, including system architecture, specifications of the platform, energy efficiency, cost effectiveness, reliability, privacy, and security [17]. This paper is about to address some of those issues, focusing on the communication protocols and unified platform and service exposure capability of M2M communication. The paper contributions are the evaluation of some of the potential candidates for communication protocols on a test-bed that built around the in-house and open source-based M2M platform. The paper also shows the usefulness of the platform API (Application Programing Interface) with two demonstrated applications, named Home Automation and Smart Meter. II. PREVIOUS WORK To our best of knowledge, in the field of M2M communication and IoT most of the researches until recently are focusing on the sensing technologies and coupled wireless and wired local networking technologies like RFID or IEEE 802.15.4 and there are a few of researching works on the M2M platform, though, worthy to analyze here. Regarding to the M2M platform architecture, amongst others, the most significant works are inside working groups of the standardization body ETSI and industrial forum OneM2M.