On the 19th June 2014, a specially arranged Cambridge Wireless event - ‘Wirelessly Connecting the Internet of Things’ - will take place in Melbourn Science Park, Cambridge. This will bring together members of an industry working group set up by Vodafone to present the background and the key features of new system proposals, with additional inputs from silicon vendors, system integrators and the view from the “Internet of Things” enterprise community. This engaging event will see participants from Vodafone, Ericsson, Nokia Systems and Networks, Huawei, Neul and TTP.
GSM is widely used today for millions of devices, as its costs are relatively low, but mobile broadband technologies such as 3G and LTE are more expensive, may have worse coverage, and take too much power for “things” that may have to work for years on small batteries. Though many “things” may be connected using short range wireless, many more will be beyond the reach of systems like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Zigbee. The ideal system would just “be there” in the background, supporting very low cost terminals that can run for years on small batteries and easy to use for application developers.
A group of industry players, including network and device suppliers, operators and academics, brought together by Vodafone, has been looking at the problem of supporting the “Internet of Things” for the past year and has recently published a White Paper outlining the options. These include further new features in LTE that would be defined through 3GPP or an alternative “clean slate” cellular standard defined specifically to meet the needs of the IoT. Any future system will need to connect “things” that don’t have large amounts of data to communicate; can be in hard-to-reach locations such as manholes, meter closets, and in very isolated locations; and need to operate for years on small batteries. The purpose of this paper is to share across the industry a vision of how a low-cost m2m solution could be developed, either as an integrated part of or a complement to the evolution of current cellular technology. This would allow operators to provide connectivity for all sorts of devices in the future in the mass Internet of Things (IoT) market.
You can download the White Paper here, and also brief summaries of the LTE Based and Clean Slate proposals.
Among our outstanding speakers for this event are:
- David Lister, R&D Manager, Vodafone
- Johan Bergman, System Manager, Ericsson
- Amitava Ghosh, Head of North American Radio Systems research, Nokia
- Weilang Zhang, Project Manager, Huawei
- Robert Young, Co-Founder VP Systems & Silicon, Neul
- Robin Heydon, Fellow, Global Standards, CSR
- John Roe, Technology Planning Lead, Accenture Mobility
- Dr Antony Rix, Senior Consultant, TTP Group
