Introducing the Lightweight M2M Send Scheduler
Smarter telemetry for LPWAN devices with efficient batching and standard configuration.
Blog
Notes from the field
Practical research and delivery insights on IoT architecture, LPWAN telemetry, and device management.
Focus areas
What we write about most often.
- IoT protocols and architecture
- Security
- Device lifecycle and fleet operations
Latest
Recent posts
Short, practical reads built from real deployments.
Generating and distributing symmetrical IoT authentication keys
To ensure secure communication between devices, you need to distribute authentication keys. If your device and your transport can't work with asymmetrical cryptography or PKI, you must build on symmetrical authentication secret (password or pre-shared-keys).
IoT Traffic capture and analysis on AWS
I work with different IoT protocols and their embedded clients every day, and troubleshooting product issues in the field can be tricky. When the steps to reproduce a problem aren’t clear, I like to capture the traffic during the issue. This helps me see what’s actually happening and how the client and server are interacting.
Life and death of Java asynchronous network programming
Network programming in Java has changed significantly over the last 20+ years. Mainly driven by the desire to handle larger loads by an ever-increasing number of connections.
Adding WebSocket to a REST backend
As a software architect, I often need to deal with backend systems that provide a variety of REST APIs, each supporting a set of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. Traditionally, these systems haven’t offered a way for clients to subscribe to real-time notifications. So, clients are forced to either continuously poll the server or require users to manually refresh their browsers, which can be a frustrating user experience in 2023.
Lightweight M2M Object 25: gateway
A separate specification was added to the Lightweight M2M 1.2 release: object 25 named "Gateway." This object is used by a Lightweight M2M device to act as a proxy for devices without a direct IP/CoAP connection to the management server.
Transferring files over CoAP
For constrained IoT applications, you want to limit the number of protocols and network stacks to implement. Having multiple stacks means more flash and memory usage, and protocols are infamous consumers of RAM buffers.
CoAP and Lightweight M2M challenges with NAT gateways
With the rise of low power wide area (LPWA) networks, we see a rising interest in UDP-based protocols, but trading TCP for UDP has its own class of challenges.
Embedded software testing with GitHub Actions
Continuous Integration pipelines can greatly improve your embedded software reliability and your release turn-over. But it’s a large investment and can be quite time consuming, especially for small teams.
Setup Cloudflare CFSSL with OCSP responder
CFSSL is both an HTTP based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Certificate Authority server, an Online Certificate Status Protocol responder and a PKI toolkit.
Notes: X.509 Certificates and the Internet-of-Things
Today most of IoT/M2M applications are using passwords, pre-shared keys or maybe no security for device communications. Due to the expected massive deployment scale and the complex logistic behind it, more and more IoT shops want to deploy Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based security. For example the new AWS IoT MQTT broker is enforcing using X.509 certificates for device authentication.
Bootstrapping device security with Lightweight M2M
During the last OMA LWM2M Test Fest I was quite surprised the bootstrap procedure wasn’t present in the test cases proposed by the organizers. Furthermore only few vendors implemented it, or even understand what’s the purpose of this feature. So I decided to write this little introduction.
The 4 Elements of Internet-of-Things Security
The Internet of Things (IoT) is fascinating: it is a game changer for health-care, connected homes and cities, ground transportation, and many other domains. It is also fascinating due to its unprecedented scale, and the billions of things that are in play.