Local network technologies like WLAN have a distributed coordination function, i.e. every device decides for itself when it wants to transmit on a common channel and have backoff and repetition features with random and increasing delays to get out of situations when more than one device transmits at the same time. Another helpful thing in … Continue reading Cellular IoT – Network Friendly Devices and GSMA TS.34
Another NB-IoT number floating around is that very power efficient NB-IoT devices should be capable to be driven from a small battery for more than 10 years without needing a recharge. Again, I wondered where this number comes from and which assumptions were made to declare that this is possible.
There is an interesting number floating around in various whitepapers and articles on IoT: NB-IoT supports 50.000 devices per sector per cell. So where does that number come from and is it realistic?
Over the past months, 3GPP was quite busy to ensure the NB-IoT made it into Release 13 before time ran out. So far, I’ve been looking into CRs and the Work Item description to get an idea of what is standardized because the Release 13 specification documents themselves did not yet contain NB-IoT content. Fortunately … Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 8 – A Whitepaper and 3GPP Spec References
One of the main requirements of many IoT scenarios is extremely low power consumption of a device in exchange for only sending and receiving very little data and very long intervals in which no data is exchanged at all. If a device does not need to react instantly to incoming requests it doesn’t make sense … Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 6 – High Latency Communication
In part 4 of my mini-series about 3GPPs Internet of Things standardisation for cellular networks I’ve given an overview of the currents state of the NB-IoT standardization in 3GPP. Most of what I’ve written in there is based on a 3GPP Technical Report that summarizes the different options that were studied and RP-151621 which contains … Continue reading Cellular IoT – How to find out more about NB-IoT in 3GPP – Part 5
In the three previous parts (here, here and here) on the Internet of Things and 3GPP, I’ve described Cat-1, Cat-0 and Cat-M1 devices. In this post we get down to the really interesting development in 3GPP on this topic: Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and Cat-NB1 devices (previously referred to as Cat M2 devices).
After an overview in part 1 and and introduction to rather simple enhancements for the Internet of Things (IoT) with LTE Cat-1 and Cat-0 devices in part 2, this 3rd part in my mini-series on the cellular Internet of Things (IoT) takes a look at some of the more profound changes in the LTE specifications … Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – Part 3 – Cat-M1 Devices
In part 1 on this topic I’ve been giving a quick overview of Machine Type Communication (MTC) and Internet of Things (IoT) from a cellular network operator and 3GPP point of view. In this post I’ll jump right to the first couple of enhancements made the 3GPP LTE specifications over the years to show which … Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – Part 2 – Cat-1 and Cat-0 Devices
I haven’t written a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) so far as there are so many different approaches discussed, specified, prototypes tested and proprietary solutions rolled out these days. In other words, it’s not easy to keep an overview and to get a feeling which solutions might might become popular and which will … Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – MTC, NB-IOT and Things In Between – Part 1