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Addressing The Challenges Facing IoT Adoption

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The Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon—ubiquitous connected things providing key physical data and further processing of that data in the cloud to deliver business insights— presents a huge opportunity for many players in electronics and software, including chipset vendors, device developers, OEMs, manufacturers, equipment vendors, network operators and end-to-end solutions providers. Many companies are organizing themselves to focus on IoT and the connectivity of their future products.

CHALLENGES

For the IoT industry to thrive, three items are crucial: a viable business model, a robust connectivity topology and reliable devices. This article discusses these, focusing on the design challenges that must be overcome to make reliable devices.

Challenges vary depending on the IoT application. While cost is a major factor in consumer applications (e.g., wearables and home automation), industrial IoT applications (e.g., smart grids, connected cars and transportation) require unfailing reliability, longevity, security and the ability to operate devices with little or no human intervention.

The Business Model

End-to-end solution providers operating in vertical industries and delivering services using cloud analytics will be the most successful at monetizing a large portion of the value in IoT. Low power, wide area (LPWA) IoT technologies open up possibilities for service providers.

Knowing the location of pets and vehicles, tracking valuable personal belongings, monitoring utility usage, obtaining real-time data on the health of crops and livestock, employee fatigue and machine status are useful for individuals and businesses.

A typical smartphone contract delivers roughly five cents per MB of data. Assuming an IoT application uses 100 KB per month, and a user is willing to pay a modest 10 cents per month for these new IoT applications, that’s already better business for an operator.

Delivering $1 per MB is 20x more revenue than a typical smartphone contract for the same amount of data consumption. While many IoT applications may attract modest revenue, some can attract more than $10 per month.

For little burden on the existing communication infrastructure, operators have the potential to open up a significant source of new revenue using LPWA technologies. Clearly, it is important to understand the value chain and business model for the IoT application.

Connectivity Topology

These connect to gateway devices using short-range wireless links, and the gateways communicate to the cloud via wide-area networks, such as LTE. Across a variety of vertical industries, the realization of IoT networks will involve a heterogeneous mix of wireless technologies, including NB-IoT, Cat-M, Z-Wave, ZigBee, SIGFOX, LoRa, ANT, Thread, Wi- SUN, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Individually and collectively, these pose special challenges such as power dissipation, transmission range, data rates, seamless connectivity, handshake protocols, security and radio compliance. This diversity in deployed technologies presents a significant opportunity and challenge for the entire IoT industry.

Modern microcontrollers make it possible for machine learning to run on even the lowest power devices at the edge of the network, to respond to sensor data and send triggers when actionable events take place. Connectivity topology becomes more interesting with distributed machine learning, analytics and intelligence in gateways and end nodes making more efficient use of bandwidth.

Reliable Devices and Design Challenges

IoT devices present many design challenges, some similar and many Developers must overcome constraints from battery drain, power, signal integrity and the complexities of the RF chain. LPWA technologies such as NB-IoT are governed by 3GPP, which requires RF conformance testing before being deployed on networks. Interference and coexistence must also be verified. The following sections dive deeper into each of these design challenges to producing reliable devices.

BATTERY DRAIN

Optimizing and guaranteeing power consumption is a requirement for many IoT devices. In some installations, multiple years of battery life may be committed through a service level agreement (SLA) contract. A software update could use months of battery capacity, and too many “over the air” updates to resolve defects and security issues could compromise battery life.

Network settings and handshake protocols between the device and the network can also reduce battery life significantly. What happens if the network is down? Does the device search repeatedly for the network and drain the battery?

For IoT devices, the active state —when the device is transmitting or receiving data—is very short compared to idle and standby states. Measuring the current consumption is key to understanding and optimizing the power consumption.

For example, in transmit, Bluetooth low energy transmitters use tens of mA compared to a few A for GSM transmitters. The majority of the time, devices are in idle mode, drawing from tens to hundreds of nA up to hundreds of μA.

Because IoT devices have very low duty cycles, a common way to lower the total current drain is to design the system so the device has a very short active state followed by periods of relatively low activity or no activity.

The challenge in verifying the likely battery life is to accurately measure the dynamic current drain across the different operating modes over a period of time and with a single view that provides a complete and detailed analysis.

RADIO FORMATS

With many types of devices deployed in consumer and industrial applications (e.g., smart grid, smart energy, smart factories and smart homes), many IoT formats are being deployed and many operate in the same spectrum (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee). These environments will affect multi-radio interference (co-channel or adjacent channel), transmission range and speed, and interoperability. All must be considered.

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