Friday, 4 April 2008

FMC + M-to-M at home and outside

I was lent a copy of Fixed Mobile Convergence book that was recently released by McGraw Hill. Very interesting book if you are involved in some way or other in FMC world. If you think you missed out on many conferences on FMC (and saved thousands of pounds) then investing in this book will provide you with far more information and may make you an expert.

Here is a snippet of something I always like reading and think will be big in future:

Improved availability, reachability, and cost savings enabled by FMC can be applied not only to communication between humans or humans and machines, but also to communication between machines themselves, for instance, intelligent devices with microprocessors running applications—machine-to-machine (M-to-M)—with far-reaching consequences.

To date, the solutions offered by telecom service providers have almost always involved a human user at one endpoint of a communication session. With the mass deployment of wireless networks and microprocessor-based remote sensing devices, this paradigm is about to change, with literally millions of devices capable of connectivity
being readied by manufacturers in different industries.



The solution in Figure above allows persons and remote applications to monitor the status of stationary and semistationary objects in the home zone and control their behavior based on policies, changing conditions, and other factors. The home-zone objects may interface with the home-zone M-to-M controller via low-power, close-proximity technologies such as ZigBee, defined in IEEE 802.15.4 specifying Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), and Z-wave (a proprietary standard developed by a company called Zensys), or more mainstream Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies (depending on specific implementations).


The applications relying on such a symbiosis of M-to-M and FMC may include inexpensive and easy-to-install,8 standards-based, remote monitoring and control equipment. In residential applications, for example, communicating thermostats, security systems, and lighting, as well as numerous mobile assets belonging to a household such as vehicles, pets, and family members, can be enabled to maintain uniform connectivity and create an M-to-M ecosystem, as depicted in Figure above.

If this interests you then information on the book as follows:


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