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The Goal – A Common Machine-to-Machine Service Layer
More and more IoT solutions and products are in development, which can be challenging as IoT is still an evolving technology and must be compliant with the latest standards regarding robustness and security. OneM2M is the leading global standardization body developing technical specifications for machine to machine communications. The main goal of these specifications is to create a common machine-to-machine (M2M) service layer that can be easily embedded within IoT hardware and software solutions to enable all devices to communicate with the M2M application servers.
oneM2M technical specifications cover requirements, architecture (high level and detailed), protocols and API specifications, security solutions, interoperability for machine-to-machine, and IoT technologies that spread across domains like smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart homes, smart logistics, autonomous transportation and more.
1. Understand the Challenges of M2M / IoT Development
Several international bodies and organizations have been actively preparing, correcting, and maintaining these specifications to create a robust and easy-to-use, portable common service layer. During this process, vendors continue to develop new IoT hardware and software solutions that are compatible, flexible and future-proof with the latest standards, which has not been easy. Before products or software solutions can be launched, they need to be certified by oneM2M to ensure compliance. The oneM2M TST Working Group has developed a TTCN-3 based conformance test specification for that purpose.
During development and compliance testing, organizations may run into several challenges including:
Complexity of architecture involving complex event processing and use cases
Sensors, gateways and software being dependent on each other
Real-time synchronization issues, security, backward compatibility and upgrade issues
Devices with user interface are challenging to test
Availability of the real-time network
2. Validate oneM2M Test Solution Requirements
Application Entity (AE) and Common Services Entity (CSE) are the different components of a common oneM2M service layer which needs to be validated and verified correctly for interoperability, conformance and performance. Vendors need solutions especially designed for testing oneM2M standard compatibility. Otherwise, a lot of time and effort in product development would be wasted.
To address these challenges, Spirent has developed a complete test solution that helps users perform oneM2M conformance testing. Spirent TTsuite-oneM2M, a standardized, ready-to-use test solution based on the test automation platform TTworkbench, covers all common oneM2M service layer functionalities.
3. Maintain Fully Automated Testing of oneM2M Standard
Spirent TTsuite-oneM2M supports both release 1 and 2 of the oneM2M standard. This provides oneM2M tool vendors the opportunity to roll out their products with either release according to individual requirements for their conformance testing needs. It also covers different categories of oneM2M testing including conformance, interoperability, as well as system/performance testing.
The solution provides a fully automated testing process with complete test execution, test analysis and report generation. It can be used for conformance testing of CSE, AE, AND, and ASN (with many different test configurations) covering test infrastructure requirements of major organizations. Furthermore, specific instantiations of CSE, AE, AND, ASN, MN, IN can be easily created due to the modularity provided by this solution.
Spirent TTsuite-oneM2M supports all protocols of the common oneM2M service layer by providing the protocol bindings (like CoAP, http, MQTT, and WebSockets) and Serializations (like XML, JSON, and CBOR). One of the most useful features for quality assurance is the analysis function which helps to quickly identify issues and defects in early stages of design. Users can see incidents in either the graphical view, textual view, or in the call stack with the status of the message cycle. The legends used for displaying the analyzed data give a quick visual overview.
Visual overview helps identify issues and defects in early stages of design
4. Make Sure to Use a Flexible Testing Solution
Spirent TTsuite-oneM2M uses standardized TTCN-3 code and interfaces, providing tool vendors the ability to customize test cases or scenarios according to their individual testing needs. They benefit from easy and flexible test design to match their tool architecture and feature requirements. The solution comes with several ready-to-use plugins for specific test development. In addition, there are many more proprietary extensions available like CoAP, WSDL, MQTT, http, WebSockets, ASN.1, Protobuf as well as connectivity for AMQP, Ethernet, IP, TCP, UDP, Telnet, RS232, SIP, etc. The plug-and-play concept guarantees immediate, full access to the System Under Test, saving users from additional, time-consuming test implementation efforts.
Latest oneM2M Conformance Testing News
Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) press release: oneM2M conformance testing will ensure interoperability and reliability of IoT products
Spirent press release: Spirent Selected as the First Official Test Tool Provider for oneM2M
