Machine-to-Machine

Though often incorrectly confused with IoT, digital M2M has existed in industries for the last two to three decades. Broadly speaking, M2M refers to any technology that enables machines to exchange information and perform actions without any human mediation. From that end, M2M is foundational to the development of IoT.

To quote from (GART-IOT) ,"The key components of an M2M system are: Field-deployed wireless devices with embedded sensors or RFID-Wireless communication networks with complementary wireline access includes, but is not limited to cellular communication, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, WiMAX, wireless LAN (WLAN), generic DSL (xDSL), and fiber to the x (FTTx)."

The cellular M2M communications industry can be traced back to when Siemens developed and launched a GSM data module called M1 in 1995. M1 was based on the Siemens mobile phone S6, which was used for M2M industrial applications; it enabled machines to communicate over wireless networks.

In industries, telemetry was a very common use case for M2M, in addition to remote monitoring and the control of field assets.