Thirteen billion “things” are currently connected by digital sensors and transmitters. That number is projected to grow to 39 billion by 2020. The expected impact on the global economy by 2025: $…
Posts Tagged → IoT
Race for the IoT connectivity standard
According to McKinsey Global Institute, by 2025 we should expect 50 billion connected devices or nodes, representing $6 trillion of incremental business. Such high and hard to even imagine number of concurrently reporting nodes will present significant challenges. Starting with security, but also handling tremendous amount of data generated by all these nodes, even registering so many devices. All these will have to be accommodated by underneath wide area network technology supporting IoT. Lets don’t forget about other factors such as cost and low power requirements. In order to adopt IoT, the overhead cost (radio and supporting electronics) should be reasonable low or around $5. From practical perspective, nodes should be able to operate for years on a single set of small batteries. Ideally, subscriptions (aka mobile) are out of questions as this model would quickly become unmanageable and way too expensive.
The race to define IoT connectivity standard has already began…
As of today, we can refer to two type of networks; narrow band and lte based.
Nokia White Paper, LTE-MNarrow band networks:
Sigfox, uses unlicensed frequencies (868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in the US & Canada). Sigfox has submitted the technology to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
Weightless is a standard designed to operate in the TV White Space bands.
LoRa, uses unlicensed frequencies (868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in the US & Canada).
On-Ramp Wireless RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) technology based on unlicensed 2.4GHz band.
Huawei/Neul clean-slate technology (FDMA) is focusing to standardize under 3GPP GERAN for licensed spectrum operation.
NR-LTE: Narrow band LTE; Joint effort by Ericsson, Intel and Nokia.
LTE:
In order to meet low cost / high range requirements, “release 13” devices would have to be deployed. The expected date for mass deployment is mid 2017.
This gives advantage and opportunity to narrow band technologies to define IoT WAN standard before alternative options are even available. As of today Sigfox and LoRa are the strongest players with several city wide deployments and lots of support from commercial entities.
LoRa – Long Range, Low Power WAN for IoT
One of the major challenges in wide deployment of m2m (machine to machine) communication and adoption of IoT is lack of a standard for low power, high range and low cost communication method between nodes and gateways or concentrators. One of the proposed standards to address this problem is LoRa by LoRa Alliance. A LoRa network of gateways, can be architected in a very similar ways to a mobile network, actually many cellular operators plan to use their existing physical infrastructure to install LoRa gear in a field.
The technology itself has been primarly developed by Semtech and LoRa Alliance has been formally announced during WMC2015 in Barcelona.
Key Elements:
- Long range: 15 – 20 km.
- Millions of nodes
- Long battery life: in excess of ten years
Supported Unlicensed Frequencies:
- 868 MHz for Europe
- 915 MHz for US & Canada
- 433 MHz for Asia
A LoRa Network would normally consist multiple nodes reporting events or receiving events to/from LoRa Gateway. A LoRa gateway would be connected onto the backhaul system usually over IP, via Ethernet or Cellular network. One of many m2m protocols such as mqtt would provide perfect communication conduit between a gateway and backend server. From there, remote systems/users could retrieve information about their nodes and/or send instructions to their actuators.
Low cost and high range could be a major factor behind adoption of LoRa in the real World.
Low power consumption could potentially allow to create power grid independent networks for emergency services and communication….