Smart Industry 2/2018

Smart Solutions NB-IoT
G5
G3
NB-IoT
G4
Flexibility is key
If you need global IoT connectivity for your devices and want to be able to change
providers and services at will, you need to be flexible. Such flexibility is no longer
a challenge with NB-IoT, a new wireless standard that works with all existing G3, G4,
and G5 cellular technologies, which makes it ideal for the next generation
of cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
n By Chris Young*
Many applications do not
require high bandwidth
or permanent connectivity.
Often, devices need
to connect only from time to time to
check in and send small data packets.
This saves connection costs and
valuable energy, enabling smart and
affordable connectivity solutions
with long battery life of up to ten
years.
For this purpose, the wireless standard
NB-IoT was created by the 3rd Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP),
a collaboration between groups of
telecommunications standards associations,
known as the Organizational
Partners. NB-IoT is a low-power widearea
(LPWA) technology developed to
enable a wide range of new IoT devices
and services.
Supported by all major mobile equipment,
chipset, and module manufacturers,
NB-IoT can coexist with 2G,
eUICC allows
users to switch
providers without
physically
changing the
embedded SIM
card itself.
3G, and 4G mobile networks. The
underlying technology is however
much simpler than today’s GSM/GPRS
and its cost is expected to decrease
rapidly as demand increases. NB-IoT
also benefits from all the security and
privacy features of mobile networks,
such as support for user identity
confidentiality, entity authentication,
confidentiality, data integrity, and
mobile equipment identification.
NB-IoT offers up to 250 kbps bandwidth
and supports a particularly
large number of connections per base
station. NB-IoT further offers an additional
20-decibel link budget. Given
the right infrastructure, this makes it
possible to increase network coverage
even in areas with previously poor
coverage. It also boosts interference
immunity and transmission quality
– even for connections inside cellars.
Compared to alternative LPWANs, NB
IoT allows significantly more data to
be transmitted in the licensed band
and provides higher bandwidth. NB-
IoT therefore addresses a much larger
number of applications. In addition,
the base station infrastructure for NB-
IoT is usually already in place as it can
rely on existing mobile networks.
To use them, all that’s typically required
is a software update of the base
stations. Only a few locations need an
additional hardware upgrade that’s
relatively easy to implement. The use
of NB-IoT by major mobile operators
is therefore expected to accelerate
exponentially in the near future. Areas
of application can be found wherever
limited data rates, such as Sigfox LP-
WAN, which can send 144 messages
per day at 12 bytes in the direction of
the cloud, are no longer sufficient. But
even NB-IoT has its limits.
A valuable addition to NB-IoT is Cat
M1. Like NB-IoT, this is a 3GPP Release
13 standard. It offers an even higher
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*Chris Young is an Embedded Software Specialist at Avnet Silica.