Service Environment for Smart Wireless Devices: An M2M Gateway Selection Scheme

Wireless standardization activities, such as the Bluetooth V4.x (Bluetooth smart), have led to an explosive growth in innovative short-range wireless devices capable of providing various services to assist everyday life. Allowing machine-to-machine (M2M) communication between these M2M devices also presents new commercial service opportunities. M2M service providers, including telecom carriers, may need to establish new networks to accommodate M2M interactions while identifying new business opportunities. Typically, M2M devices need another capable device, such as a smartphone, to act as a gateway to connect to the Internet to operate at their full potential. We propose a novel scheme in which any Internet-enabled device in the vicinity can act as an M2M gateway for M2M devices. This eliminates the need for the M2M device user to also own a smartphone or an Internet-enabled device to obtain services such as online-to-offline. This scheme faces new challenges, such as how to identify the best M2M gateway for a required service and the QoS. This paper proposes a method to select an M2M gateway from a large number of possibilities in order to increase service availability while also obtaining better signal strength for higher QoS. The methods presented are evaluated in terms of their performance, including energy consumption, and a service deployment guideline is derived using real-world data collected at an exhibition, which gave encouraging results.