by Benedikt Herudek
Machines can’t (hardly) communicate
One classical form of Machine to Machine Communication can be found in Enterprise Integration. Consider the case of a CRM and Billing System in a Telecommunications enterprise. Client orders are taken in with the CRM System. After the Order is fulfilled, the Billing System will be responsible to generate a bill. Both Systems (in fact there are many more) know the concept of a Client and of Products, but they have different ways of talking about them and their internal Data Models differ.
Communication between Applications is often done with the help of Middleware and so called Enterprise Service Bus. These Applications render infrastructure with the necessary features around security, performance and stability. An important part of such centralized message brokers is that they handle the translation between the Applications. Often, they use a central translation layer, a generic language for concepts that both Applications know (the ‘customer’) and over which they have to exchange information. ‘
With the rise of the Internet of Things, the problem sometimes takes often the form, that devices have different message Formats but need to be able to communicate, e.g. the iPhone needs to be able to take over from remote controls and talk to all TV’s. The scenario is sometimes referred to as the ‘Baskets of Remotes Problem’ describing the situation we find in many households, where there will be one remote for any device like Television or sound machine, but none of those remotes is able to speak to any other device than the one it was initially designed for. There are at least two reasons, why the question of machine communication will be even more prominent in the Internet of Things.
For one, there will be much more devices and hardware in the Internet, potentially with […]
