i3 - July/August 2016 - 12

Tech

By Murray Slovick

A T EC H TO WATC H

New Wireless
Options for IoT

he Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity game is heating up. Competing wireless technologies are aiming to
demonstrate that they represent the best combination
of bandwidth, range, low power consumption and scalability, which cannot be in the millions, but must be in the tens of
billions as the number of devices connecting to the IoT grows.

on either 433MHz, 868MHz (most of
IoT is helping lead the U.S. consumer
Europe), or 915MHz (USA) frequencies.
technology industry to a record-setting
The LoRa Alliance has been established to
$287 billion in retail revenues ($224
promote the solution.
billion wholesale) in 2016, according to
As part of its long-term strategy to
CTA. By 2025 30 billion IoT-connected
support IoT services, South Korea's largdevices will be deployed says Machina
est mobile operator SK Telecom plans
Research. IoT devices may be core
to deploy a nationwide
consumer tech products
network this year based on
like smart TVs, streaming
By 2025,
LoRa technology from the
media players and fitness
an estimated
LoRa Alliance. Samsung is
monitors but also machines
30 billion
the network partner for SK
and complex sensors used
IoT-connected Telecom's LoRa network.
in self-driving cars.
The service is scheduled to
Most of these wiredevices will
launch in Daegu, Korea's
less connections will be
be deployed,
fourth largest city, and will
addressed by Wi-Fi and
says Machina
use the 900MHz freBluetooth, however, a sigResearch
quency band.
nificant number of devices
This past February a
(an estimated seven billion
LoRa IoT network deployed
by 2025) will require low
by Digimondo, a subsidiary of E.ON, a
power, low throughput (the amount
leading energy supplier, was demonstrated
of information processed in a given
amount of time) and long range; these are in Nuremberg, Germany, wirelessly tracking public transportation vehicles across
expected to be handled via Low-Power
the city. Digimondo also intends to use
Wide-Area (LPWA) and cellular-based
LoRa for such IoT applications as smart
IoT networks. Emerging technolometering. The network infrastructure,
gies designed to handle these applicatested in Hamburg and Berlin last year, has
tions include LoRaWAN (Long Range
been approved for further deployments in
Wide-Area Network, LoRa) and SigFox,
Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf,
which use unlicensed spectrum as well
Essen and Cologne.
as cellular-based LTE variants operating
LoRa is competing against other proover licensed spectrum.
prietary technologies such as Ingenu (a
LoRa sits between cellular and Wi-Fi,
dedicated machine-to-machine (M2M)
and can support massive IoT deployment.
technology) and Sigfox (a subscriptionIt is intended for wireless battery operated
based low-power, wide-area (LPWA)
IoT devices in regional, national or global
communications network operating in
networks. LoRa employs a chip made by
18 countries and with more than seven
Semtech that is capable of bi-directional
million registered devices).
data rates between 0.3kbps and 50kbps
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JULY/AUGUST 2016

Ingenu employs RPMA, or Random
Phase Multiple Access, designed specifically
for wireless M2M communication can cover
300 square miles per tower in real world
conditions. RPMA gains its largest chunk of
coverage from receiver sensitivity. Optimized receiver sensitivity provides a healthy
amount of signal power while still maintaining a great deal of capacity. Transmission power is also maximized to the greatest
extent that government regulations allow.
That is one of the reasons RPMA operates in the 2.4 GHz band of spectrum, as it
allows for greater transmission power.
Specially designed for IoT, cellular technologies such as Narrow-Band IoT (NBIoT) concentrate on indoor coverage, low
cost, long battery life (10 years) and a large
number of devices (more than 100,000
connections per cell). It can be deployed
in GSM and LTE, using resource blocks
within a normal LTE carrier, or "stand
alone" for deployments in dedicated spectrum. The NB-IoT standard is expected to
be ratified by 3GPP.
Huawei is one of the main drivers of
NB-IoT. At its Global Analysts summit in
Shenzen, Zhu Cheng, director of the
company's cellular IoT product line said
NB-IoT is "going to be reality this year."
Huawei predicts by 2020 there will be three
billion cellular IoT connections, driven by
applications such as smart metering.
eMTC, also known as LTE-M, is another
overlay of the existing LTE cellular structure. Included in 3GPP release 13, it is
designed to provide data rates of up to
1Mbps over licensed spectrum but at a
fraction of the required device complexity required by regular LTE. It offers with
1.4 MHz bandwidth and claims up to four
times better coverage, while reducing device
complexity compared to conventional LTE.
KT, one of Korea's leading cellular
operators, and Nokia recently conducted
the first eMTC field trial, over KT's LTE
network using Nokia's Flexi Multiradio
10 Base Station. eMTC used only 1.4 MHz
of the full 20 MHz LTE system, leaving
the remaining spectrum free for normal
LTE cellular traffic. The trial marked an
important milestone for IoT, as it demonstrated the viability of coexistence with the
existing LTE network.
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i3 - July/August 2016

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