Smartcard based heart-beat service for M2M communication

Abstract: This study concerns machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that use smartcards. More specifically,The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) smart card is used for the purpose of monitoring a continuousnetwork connection between a host device and a server. Multicom Security is a security company thatoffers several secure communication connection services (e.g. payment transactions, alarm signals). Themonitoring of these connections is carried out with continuous heart-beat messages sent from thedevice to a server. Today they provide this heart-beat service through logic in their own manufactureddevices, but they have a desire to place the logic on a SIM card in order to be able to move such serviceswith this card and not with a device. Such services can then also be offered on devices not necessarilymanufactured by Multicom Security.The work consisted of investigation of current telecommunication standards, papers regardingsmartcard applications and the current monitoring service, in order to consider possible solutions toimplement a proof of concept of such solution and evaluate it. One aspect of the study was to checkwhether the implemented solution was general and would work in different mobile equipments and alsoto determine the limitations of such smartcard applications.Three solutions were considered for implementation of which one was successfully implemented andtested. The successful heart-beat application was developed using a network subscription enabled JavaCard smart card and using SMS as bearer for the heart-beat messages. By evaluating the solution withbasic tests of functionality, robustness, performance and compatibility the solution was considered to begeneral and compliant with most new mobile equipments. The evaluation was performed in realenvironment with the application running on an actual SIM card with network subscription tested indifferent mobile devices such as cell phones, built-in communication modules and alarm control panels.An alternative solution based on GRPS instead of SMS was also realized but the tests could not becarried out completely due to lack of access to the SIM card implementation by the card provider.