Last week the OMA had their face-to-face meeting in Warsaw and in this short blog post OMA would like to share some key information about where we are with our work on LwM2M, which is work done in one of the working groups at OMA – the Device Management (DM) group.

This meeting was more than a gathering of standardization professionals but was also co-located with the TestFest, which was sponsored by AVSystem. This TestFest is another one in the long series of test events conducted by OMA to ensure that LwM2M v1.0.x implementations are interoperable. This event was well attended with 11 LwM2M server and 10 LwM2M client vendors, 33 test engineers from 15 different companies over a period of 4 intense days. Despite the larger test scope only few problems surfaced and they were discussed with the OMA DM group, as shown in the picture below.

Co-locating TestFests with the standardization group has already turned out to be successful in prior events due to the high bandwidth conversation possibility between developers and the standardization group, along with the ability to use breaks for socializing and quick resolution to questions. The OMA DM standardization meeting was also well attended by 15 delegates from 12 companies working on the following items:

  • The last steps to finalize the requirements for the LwM2M v1.1 specification have been taken with the planned first candidate publication date of the requirements in December 2017. Finalizing the requirements is important before digging into the technical solution details. The highlights have already been announced in an earlier blog post. The candidate enabler specification for v1.1 is expected to be released in February 2018.
  • LwM2M v1.0.2, which contains errata and clarification on top of the LwM2M v1.0.1 release published in July 2017, was finalized and will be published in January 2018. Expect only minor changes and no additional new features.
  • Developers and non-OMA members have been using the public Github repository for tracking issues and the group spent more than a day to go through the raised issues, assign responsible persons, work on detailed answers, and resolve many of them. The interaction with the wider developer community has led to new insight and certainly improved the quality of the specification.
  • With the work on LwM2M v1.1 technical specification the group uses Github as a version control system whereby the specification text is written in Markdown. Since a few organizations, most notably the IETF, have started using the combination of Github and Markdown for their specifications successfully the OMA DM WG decided that the beginning of the work on LwM2M v1.1 would be a perfect time to use more efficient tools and to also simplify the processes inside OMA DM WG. From a specification editing point of view this is obviously a big change and the specification has also been split into two parts: a LwM2M Core layer and transport binding specification. The idea behind this document split is that LwM2M Core layer specification would be able to run over more transports than today and would later include support for HTTP, MQTT, NB-IOT, CoAP over TCP, etc., in the transport binding specification without impacting the LwM2M Core layer specifications. OMA welcomes anyone to come and contribute to these new areas of interesting ideas, which need standardization within LwM2M.
  • Finally, OMA is happy to announce that the OMA DM group elected Hannes Tschofenig from ARM as a vice-chair of the group to support growing activities along with the chair, Padmakumar Subramani from Nokia. Padhu, as we call him in the group, has been leading the group for several years already and has spearheaded the transition to a more efficient use of tools.

With this meeting completed the group is looking forward to the upcoming IETF meeting in Singapore where some of the underlying building blocks will be discussed, such as CoAP over TCP or many of the IoT security algorithms and protocols. To meet the aggressive deadlines published in our earlier blog post, a lot of work will have to be done in the next 1 ½ months.

With the steady progress on LwM2M, OMA is very excited to work on further improving interoperability and security of IoT deployments with LwM2M v1.1.