A Survey of Standards for Machine-to-Machine and the Internet of Things

Over the last decade, there has been a growing research interest in machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) as a milestone embodiment of the continuous convergence between the physical facet of human activities and its reflection on the information world. IoT is understood as the (r)evolutionary transition into an era where physical assets and virtual assets will be treated uniformly and, for all intents and purposes, be largely indistinguishable to the processes involving them. The sheer scale of IoT suggests that harmonized global standards will be paramount in realizing a seamless treatment across the physical facet and the virtual facet of things. In this paper, we survey the—;admittedly babelian—standardization landscape of IoT and present its major efforts. Our survey concludes with a comparative discussion that highlights the key challenges of future standardization in IoT.