IoT Measurement Solution Verifying the Real Performance

Verifying the Real Performance

Internet of Things (IoT) is today’s megatrend in wireless communication industry. Machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless connectivity is being adopted in various verticals at increasing pace. The number of IoT devices deployed by 2020 is expected to increase to approximately 20 billion. At the same time, the emergence of IoT poses various challenges for network operators as well as for industrial customer verticals and M2M connectivity providers. Ensuring NB-IoT devices and systems are fully optimized for use requires critical attention to battery life, network coverage and cost. The biggest challenges in IoT verification concern stability and reliability (e.g. remote updates and unattended device recovery), power consumption (up to 10+ years of battery life), and achieving extreme coverage, including deep inbuilding.

Verify and Benchmark IoT Performance

The 3GPP specification provides boundaries for the performance and operation of IoT, but the equipment implementations and the network design play major roles on the real field performance. Hence, field measurements are needed to obtain definite answers. Cellular IoT (CIoT) is defined as a set of technologies under the 3GPP umbrella to enable IoT connectivity using the licensed frequencies, co-existing with the legacy cellular broadband technologies, such as LTE, UMTS and GSM. The main CIoT technologies being rolled out globally are NB-IoT and LTE Cat-M1. Cellular IoT performance, QoS, coverage, and capacity are heavily dependent on IoT devices, network equipment implementation, interoperability between the equipment, and network design. Field measurements are important for operators and industrial IoT customers to verify and benchmark the performance of IoT solutions. Enhanced coverage is one of the key features of Cellular IoT. The coverage boost is achieved at the expense of quality of service (QoS). Hence, active testing and verification of both QoS and signal coverage are needed to understand and benchmark the true service coverage. Coverage also has a direct impact on the network capacity and device power consumption.

Nemo IoT Measurement Solution

Keysight Network Testing develops and sells RF measurement and analysis equipment under the Nemo brand. Nemo tools with support for IoT measurements are Nemo Cloud, Nemo Outdoor, Nemo Analyze, and Nemo WindCatcher. For example Nemo Outdoor drive test solution has been used by operators in multiple pilots and coverage measurements in IoT networks around the world. Nemo tools enable the comparison, troubleshooting, and benchmarking of performance of different IoT modules. Nemo tools are compatible with both Qualcomm and Neul chipsets for 3GPP LTE Cat-M1 and NB-IoT standards. Nemo tools provide easy-to-use graphical Windows user interface to control the IoT devices. Users do not need to be technical experts as there is no need to use AT commands to control the IoT modules. Nemo Analyze provides an impressive set of IoT KPIs with easy-to-use advanced analytics capabilities and a view of the complete radio stack, including application performance, key radio metrics, IoT specific KPIs and control plane signaling.