ReThink —Moving M2M out of shadows of Carriers

ReThink a EU project

The ongoing Internet (r)evolution has changed traditional business and forces it to reinvent itself. Traditional operator-enabled services are losing on their importance due to a variety of new communication services, like chat and social networks, which complement or supersede traditional ones like voice telephony. Technical progress has minimized the need for access-controlled communication services and is moving instead to context based communication, which is presumably available at only marginal or no additional cost.

The main goal of the reTHINK project is to design and prototype a new, non telecom centric, but Web-centric P2P Service Architecture enabling dynamic trusted relationships among distributed applications called Hyperlinked Entities (“Hyperties”) that support use-cases beyond commoditized telephony such as contextual and social communications, M2M/IoT and content oriented services. This project will enable any type of service delivery through specialized end-to-end network quality commitments, powered by specialized P2P and/or Cloud services (delivered as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS).

Operators today cannot directly compete at a global level because their services are not and cannot be provided outside of the deployed and owned network. 

The reTHINK project can play a crucial role in setting up an architecture that will ultimately allow operators to provide deperimetrised services and compete with large web companies. The reTHINK architecture will also provide extensible APIs designed for service developers, and will be based on secured, certified and portable identities. It will be demonstrated through an Open Source prototype that will ensure its ability to be deployed in the medium term, as well as its compliance with the more relevant use-cases. This prototype will be open to innovative parties so that its extensibility will be proven.