Internet Of Things - Connecting things together

Among other things, two of the major problems of today’s IoT are connectivity and Power. Not so surprisingly, both are intertwined in most situations. Better connectivity means coherent signal, long range and network availability. All of these can be achieved with today’s technologies, such as Wi-Fi,  3G, 4G etc. in whatever combination suites most. But the caveat is, they all come at a cost, you guessed right, The Power! A weather station plugged into the house socket has no issues streaming data. However, more often than not, IoT finds its uses as a compact module, powered by tiny batteries or setup in remote and isolated locations where power comes from either solar cells or some form of exotic energy harvesting scheme. This requirement becomes astronomically significant in designing such systems for such situations, which eventually leads to a frustrated design engineer pulling hair out or an irritated client trying to combine uncouth set of words known to man.

As I mentioned in my previous article, UNB (Ultra Narrow Band) technology schemes sheds some light with its low power requirement and long range communication capabilities. Of course we don’t get a free lunch here, and the trade-off is on the bandwidth (not just Narrow, but Ultra!). You are genius, guessing everything right here! Yes, you cannot stream videos to your shoe with UNB, sorry mate!

When you think about it, most of today’s uses for IoT revolve around small and infrequent data streams (messages). A whether station may send wind speed, temperature and humidity once every 10 minutes. A traffic light system may receive rush-hour adaptation patterns twice a day, a truck fleet may send its location every 15 minutes, a fuel pump may receive price change once a day etc. etc. Such use cases can be better dealt with UNB, with its surprisingly long distance coverage. It can span across 50km or so In line-of-sight and in urban environments the signals has a very good building penetration properties less than 10km across. This means, a handful of relay towers can cover a modern city.  In some cases one or two towers is all it needs!

The French company SIGFOX is the first to commercialize this technology, which now covers France, Spain, Netherlands, parts of UK and San-Francisco Bay area in USA. It has plans to cover the world, partnering with telecom operators.  

SEMTECH and IBM catching up with LoRaWAN, which is standardized by the LoRa Alliance. In fact, LoRa Alliance is in a mission to bring standards to the LPWAN (Low Power WAN) chaos with many products emerging, such as LTE-MTC, NWave, PLANet, Symphony Link, ThingPark Wireless etc.

Another promising standard Weightless-N, comes out  from Cambridge Wireless, shows the potential but yet to be adopted in real-world applications.

More on the subject; Riding the wave, ARTIK/SIGFOX