The Internet of Things (IoT) and its enabling services are revolutionizing the mobile ecosystem and expected to create further growth for the Telecom industry. At its core, M2M communication plays the role of fundamental enabler. It is estimated that a few tens of billions of connected devices will be deployed by 2025, and a major portion of them are going to be connected wirelessly. M2M communications are expected to open avenues for new type of services and applications such as utility meters, vending machines, telemetry, surveillance, healthcare, transportation, and automotive (e.g., smart traffic, real time traffic information, fleet management, engine monitoring, and reporting). Over the years, many research activities have been ongoing in both academia and industry to pave the path towards vast deployment of M2M communications and meeting those requirements. However, the realization of M2M communication still pose several challenging problems. The fundamental requirements to enable these services are: long battery life, low device cost, low deployment cost, full coverage, and support for a massive number of devices. Consequently, many standardization bodies (e.g., 3GPP, ETSI TC M2M, 6LowPAN, IETF, IEEE 802.16p, etc.) have launched activities to support the massive deployment of M2M communications. More notably and most recently, the 3GPP has decided to standardize Narrowband-IoT to address the requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT). The purpose is to provide improved indoor coverage, support to massive number of low throughput devices, low delay sensitivity, ultra-low device cost, low device power consumption, and optimized network architecture. Network architecture optimization in the face of a diverse set of available communication technologies depends heavily on use cases, applications and deployment environments.
Thus, the research in this area is still underway and novel solutions are needed to efficiently serve a huge number of M2M devices that interact autonomously at a global level. It opens a wide research field for future M2M communications, including research on scalability, reliability, energy-efficiency, wide-area coverage, spectral-efficiency, cost-efficiency, heterogeneity, security, and cooperation. The goal of this workshop is to bring experts and various state-of-the-art research activities in both academia and industry together in the forefront of M2M communications and IoT to present and debate trends, advanced technologies, services and applications that will make possible the integration of verticals.