Tech Briefs Magazine - October 2021 - ST-11

Another example is, if you are an
HVAC company selling rooftop units,
you want to collect data not just for
maintenance, but also on its usage.
" The cost of using a 4G network to
collect useful data is about $3 - $5 per
month, so if I have a company selling
rooftop HVACs and I have 100,000
units deployed, the expense will be
very significant. And processing all of
that data to obtain useful information
further increases the operating
expense, " said Suri. " If organizations
could provide their customers with
insights about power consumption
versus comfort level, that data could
be used to sell a more efficient unit -
or organizations could offer usagebased
pricing where they simply charge a
monthly fee based on the number of
hours that it was running. "
Edge Computing
5G's promise of low latency, high
speed, and high reliability, enables
enhanced edge computing to provide
engineers with an expanded toolbox for
designing networks.
Edge computing is beneficial in a
number of ways:
* With 5G, more computing can be
done at the edge because the edge can
be redefined to include " local clouds. "
Previously, low-latency computation
had to be done at each sensor node,
while less time-sensitive computing
could be assigned to an enterpriselevel
network or to the public cloud.
But the amount of computing that
could be done at sensor nodes was
extremely limited due to practical limitations
on physical size and power
consumption.
* With 5G connections, however, data
from remote sensors can be wirelessly
transmitted to 'local clouds', consisting
of off-the-shelf computers. These
clouds could perform low-latency computing,
which allows for decision making
to be moved closer to the source of
the data. Packages of meaningful information
rather than raw data could
then be sent to both enterprise clouds
and public clouds for less time-sensitive
processing and storage.
* In addition, organizations might want
the ability to protect sensitive data
from public exposure. Edge systems
could process data at the source and
send only anonymized and summarized
insights to the cloud for further
processing.
Sensor Technology, October 2021
Cov
Figure 4. Cloud asset monitoring display. (Image courtesy of Oracle)
Autonomous Vehicles
" Where I think you will see 5G as a
killer app, is autonomous vehicles, " said
Anderson. " They have lots of sensors on
them: lidar, radar, cameras. These all
produce large amounts of data and
require very fast response times with
extremely low latency. Autonomous
vehicles have to assimilate large amounts
of data about their surroundings in real
time and respond quickly. "
Communication between a vehicle
and anything in its surroundings,
including pedestrians, other cars, and
traffic lights, is known as V2X. This technology
enables vehicles to directly communicate
with each other for crash
avoidance. Also, if a car is approaching
an intersection and there is a traffic
light and both are connected on 5G, the
car could directly communicate to the
traffic light to understand its current
status.
" To implement 5G for autonomous
vehicles, a State Highway Department
would probably let out a contract out to
a telco (telecommunications operator)
provider, because you'd want to leverage
their cell towers and their support infrastructure, "
said Anderson. " For high
data rates and low latency, you'd need a
minimum of 1 GHz of bandwidth. And if
you really want low latency, now you're
talking in the 25 to 27 GHz (millimeter
range), which means you need a cell
tower every block in a city. In rural areas,
you could probably do about 5 kilometers
between towers. "
Since current telco cell towers are
spaced at about 20 miles, many new ones
would have to be erected. 5G millimeter
waves require roughly five times as many
cells as for the normal frequency ranges.
The saving grace is that the size of a 25
www.techbriefs.com
ToC
GHz cell tower is much smaller than the
existing telco cell towers.
" The reality is that at first, the millimeter
waveband will be aimed at people's
personal uses, so that infrastructure will
be put in place anyway. Then excess
capacity will be sold to the city or to the
state for use with autonomous vehicles, "
said Anderson.
Logistics
Logistics can benefit from being able
to track and locate large numbers of
vehicles in real time. This would be a
bonanza for fleet managers. So often,
tracking packages has amounted to
retroactively retrieving information
from a data logger. However, real-time
vehicle tracking systems use GPS and
cellular data to transmit information
about location and direction of movement
to a control station. That data can
be used to troubleshoot routes or optimize
logistics operations. Vehicle tracking
systems can also send operational
information about the vehicle, such as
fuel levels, tire pressure, ignition status,
and engine temperature that can be
used to schedule maintenance. 5G
usage in this sort of application could
also be a killer app.
In Conclusion
The bottom line is that 5G will have a
significant impact on both the IoT and
the IIoT, but this will develop slowly,
some sectors earlier and some later.
Overall, the timeline for significant integration
of 5G into IoT/IIoT applications
is on the order of five to ten years.
This article was written by Ed Brown,
Editor of Sensor Technology. For more information,
contact Ed at ebrown@techbriefs.com
or visit http://info.hotims.com/79418-161.
11
http://info.hotims.com/79418-161 http://www.techbriefs.com http://info.hotims.com/79418-936
Tech Briefs Magazine - October 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Tech Briefs Magazine - October 2021
