Decentralizing OM2M: A Self-Sustaining, Lightweight, and Scalable IoT Platform Deployment

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect billions of heterogeneous devices across diverse applications. To ensure interoperability, OM2M stands out as a popular open-source middleware platform for integrating heterogeneous IoT devices; however, its deployment complexity and limited documentation pose significant barriers to broader adoption. Existing implementations of OM2M often rely on centralized architectures, which can lead to a single point of failure, compromising the IoT system's resilience and scalability. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a lightweight, automated approach to install and configure OM2M that simplifies both the deployment process and end-node interactions. Our solution allows for a decentralized implementation of OM2M, mitigating the risks associated with centralized configurations. The proposed solution uses Docker-based containerization compatible across IoT devices with various central processing unit (CPU) architectures. Additionally, we provide a Python-based abstraction, implemented in both CPython and MicroPython, which streamlines the creation, retrieval, and management of oneM2M resources on an OM2M common service entity (CSE). Implementation results show that our containerized approach reduces CPU usage, power consumption, and memory usage compared to the bash-script-based method. These improvements highlight its efficiency in resource-constrained IoT scenarios. The proposed solution is available open-source on GitHub to encourage broader adoption, collaboration, and long-term viability within the IoT community.