Effective Categorization of Machine-To-Machine Services Applied In Cellular Network

Providing Machine-to-Machine (M2M) services is not only an opportunity but also a big challenge for telecom operators. Currently, the categorization of M2M services is mainly based on the serving field. Because the serving field is very large and new services will come up along with the progress of market, it is difficult for operators to provide services according to the serving field. Based on the real requirements from the operators and venders, there are 14 service features defined by 3GPP. However, the relation of different features is unclear. A new categorization method for M2M services based on the traffic characteristics is proposed in this paper. Based on the four traffic characteristics, including content type, data amount, transmission mode and priority of transferring, the M2M services are divided into five categories: mobile streaming, smart metering, regular monitoring, emergency alerting and mobile POS. Furthermore, the service characteristics and network requirements of each category are also analyzed.