Showing posts with label Internet of Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet of Things. Show all posts

Tuesday 3 February 2015

5G: A 2020 Vision


I had the pleasure of speaking at the CW (Cambridge Wireless) event ‘5G: A Practical Approach’. It was a very interesting event with great speakers. Over the next few weeks, I will hopefully add the presentations from some of the other speakers too.

In fact before the presentation (below), I had a few discussions over the twitter to validate if people agree with my assumptions. For those who use twitter, maybe you may want to have a look at some of these below:







Anyway, here is the presentation.

 

Wednesday 23 April 2014

Different flavours of Bluetooth: 4.0, 4.1, Low Energy, Smart, Smart Ready...

Once upon a time, Nokia proposed a standard called Wibree. That standard was good enough to be merged with Bluetooth SIG and then become part of Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE or BLE) standards.


The Bluetooth Low Energy standards comes in two different flavours, 'Smart' and 'Smart Ready'
The Smart and Smart Ready were introduced in 2011 to explain which devices will be compatible to what. Here is a table which explains how interoperability would work.


One of the obvious use of Bluetooth Low Energy is in Beacons. Here is an excellent presentation on Bluetooth 4.0:



Bluetooth 4.1 brings new capabilities in Bluetooth for it to become a challenger for Internet of Things (IoT). Here is an extract from an article in Network Computing:

With 4.1, the Bluetooth SIG is aiming to become a major player in the much-hyped Internet of Things (IOT) market. While 4.0 steps on Wi-Fi’s turf for location-based interaction with client devices, Bluetooth 4.1 looks to leverage Bluetooth's broad name recognition, widespread acceptance, and new low-power capabilities to compete with technologies that also want in on the IOT. These include ZigBee and Near Field Communication, both which are arguably niche technologies that just aren't familiar to many people.

As IoT looms larger for environments of all sizes, Bluetooth 4.1 allows client devices to daisy-chain to each other and multiple devices simultaneously for larger networks that are more Zigbee-like. Perhaps the biggest change for those of us who have to guide our network environments into the future: Bluetooth’s latest version lays the groundwork for dedicated device channels and the use of IPv6 for smart sensors to bridge themselves out of the isolated PAN world and into the IOT. This represents a major and substantial change to the Bluetooth mission, and will absolutely impact the Zigbee market in some substantial way.

Other features with Bluetooth 4.1 make it generally better in its PAN role. Bluetooth has been improved to ensure that nearby LTE radios (frequently under the same device hood) are not interfered with. It has a longer allowable interval between service advertisements, for better battery life and less chatter in the busy 2. GHz band. One of the big gains with 4.1 is the Bulk Transfer feature. For example, the feature would allow my fitness gizmo to auto-transfer all the data it's recorded of my gym activities when I get within range of my cell phone to update the app that tracks my activities.

An FAQ from the Bluetooth SIG on 4.1 is embedded below:


Saturday 25 January 2014

Security and other development on the Embedded SIM


Its no surprise that GSMA has started working on Embedded SIM specifications. With M2M getting more popular every day, it would make sense to have the SIM (or UICC) embedded in them during the manufacturing process. The GSMA website states:

The GSMA’s Embedded SIM delivers a technical specification to enable the remote provisioning and management of Embedded SIMs to allow the “over the air” provisioning of an initial operator subscription and the subsequent change of subscription from one operator to another.
The Embedded SIM is a vital enabler for Machine to Machine (M2M) connections including the simple and seamless mobile connection of all types of connected vehicles. In the M2M market the SIM may not easily be changed via physical access to the device or may be used in an environment that requires a soldered connection, thus there is a need for ‘over the air’ provisioning of the SIM with the same level of security as achieved today with traditional “pluggable” SIM. It is not the intention for the Embedded SIM to replace the removable SIM currently used as the removable SIM still offers many benefits to users and operators in a number of different ways – for example, the familiarity of the form factor, easy of portability, an established ecosystem and proven security model.
















The last time I talked about embedded SIM was couple of years back, after the ETSI security workshop here. Well, there was another of these workshops recently and an update to these information.


The ETSI presentation is not embedded here but is available on Slideshare here. As the slide says:

An embedded UICC is a “UICC which is not easily accessible or replaceable, is not intended to be removed or replaced in the terminal, and enables the secure changing of subscriptions” (ETSI TS 103 383)


Finally, Embedded SIM should not be confused with Soft-SIM. My last post on Soft-SIM, some couple of years back here, has over 15K views which shows how much interest is there in the soft SIM. As the slide says:

Soft or Virtual SIM is a completely different concept that does not use existing SIM hardware form factors and it raises a number of strong security issues:

  • Soft SIM would store the Operator secret credentials in software within the Mobile device operating system - the same system that is often attacked to modify the handset IMEI, perform SIM-Lock hacking and ‘jail-break’ mobile OS’s
  • Operators are very concerned about the reduction in security of their credentials through the use of Soft SIM. Any SIM approach not based on a certified hardware secure element will be subject to continual attack by the hacking community and if compromised result in a serious loss of customer confidence in the security of Operator systems
  • Multiple Soft SIM platforms carrying credentials in differing physical platforms, all requiring security certification and accreditation would become an unmanageable overhead – both in terms of resource, and proving their security in a non-standardised virtual environment

The complete GSMA presentation is as follows:



You may also like my old paper:

Monday 9 December 2013

Rise of the "Thing"

Light Reading carried an interesting cartoon on how M2M works. I wouldnt be surprised if some of the M2M applications at present do work like this. Jokes apart, last week the UK operator EE did a very interesting presentation on Scaling the network for the Rise of the Thing.

A question often asked is "What is the difference between the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) and 'Machine to Machine' (M2M)?". This can generate big discussions and can be a lecture on its own. Quora has a discussion on the same topic here. The picture above from the EE presentation is a good way of showing that M2M is a subset of IoT. 

Its also interesting to note how these 'things' will affect the signalling. I often come across people who tell me that since most M2M devices just use small amounts of data transfer, why is there a need to move from GPRS to LTE. The 2G and 3G networks were designed primarily for Voice with Data secondary function. These networks may work well now but what happens when the predicted 50 Billion connected devices are here by 2020 (or 500 Billion by 2030). The current networks would drown in the control signalling that would often result in congested networks. Congestion control is just one of the things 3GPP is working on for M2M type devices as blogged earlier here. In fact the Qualcomm presentation blogged about before does a decent job of comparing various technologies for IoT, see here.

The EE presentation is embedded as follows:



Another good example website I was recently made aware of is http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-examples/ - worth checking how IoT would help us in the future.

Friday 13 September 2013

LTE for Utilities and Smart Grids

This has been an area of interest for the last couple of years. Discussions have been centred around, "Is LTE fit for IoT?", "Which technology for IoT", "Is it economical to use LTE for M2M?", "Would small cells be useful for M2M?", etc.

Ericsson has recently published a whitepaper titled "LTE for utilities - supporting smart grids". One of the table that caught my eye is as follows:


LTE would be ideally suited for some of the "Performance class" requirements where the transfer time requirements is less than 100ms. Again, it can always be debated if in many cases WiFi will meet the requirements so should WiFi be used instead of LTE, etc. I will let you form your own conclusions and if you are very passionate and have an opinion, feel free to leave comment.

The whitepaper is embedded below:



Related posts:


Wednesday 31 July 2013

Making LTE fit for the IoT

Another presentation from the #FWIC2013. This presentation by Vodafone covers some of the areas where the LTE standards are being tweaked for making M2M work with them without issues.


Another area is the access barring that I have blogged about before here. This will become important when we have loads of devices trying to access the network at the same time.

The presentation is embedded below and you can also listen to the audio here.


Thursday 11 July 2013

Present and Future Technologies for Internet of Things (IoT)

An Interesting presentation from our Future of Wireless Conference (#FWIC2013) in Cambridge earlier this month. A question being asked is what technology will be used for Internet of Things (IoT) or Internet of Everything (IoE) as its also referred to nowadays. These 3 slides below summarises what technologies are see applicable to which scenarios.




Complete slides are embedded below and if you like to see the video, its available here.



Monday 18 March 2013

From M2M Communications to IoT

M2M was again in the news recently when a new report suggested that it would be $1 Trillion industry. Back in december I posted a detailed presentation on M2M that has now crossed over 6K views. This shows that there is an appetite for this topic. So here is a three part presentation on M2M and IoT. In fact as I pointed out in a post last year, it is very often referred to as IoE (Internet of Everything) rather than IoT (Internet of Things). If this is a topic close to your heart then please do come to the Future of Wireless International Conference (FWIC) organised by Cambridge Wireless on 1st and 2nd July 2013. Details here.










Saturday 24 November 2012

Connected Lighting of the future

This is an advertisement from Philips about their personal wireless lighting system called Hue. This is also the reason why we say that in future everything would be connected and with its own IP address (though this is not the case in Hue).


With Internet of Things (IoT) becoming more mainstream, it would be interesting to see these things becoming more popular and we will hopefully see more interesting apps.

This article makes an interesting reading too.

Friday 16 November 2012

Evolution of 'Internet of Things' to 'Internet of Everything' #IoE



Will the 'Internet of Humans' and the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) evolve into 'Internet of Everything' (IoE). This is certainly what Dave Evans, the Cisco Futurist thinks. This is from his blog:


From the Internet of Things (IoT), where we are today, we are just beginning to enter a new realm: the Internet of Everything (IoE), where things will gain context awareness, increased processing power, and greater sensing abilities. Add people and information into the mix and you get a network of networks where billions or even trillions of connections create unprecedented opportunities and give things that were silent a voice.

As more things, people, and data become connected, the power of the Internet (essentially a network of networks) grows exponentially. This thinking (“Metcalfe’s law”) comes from Robert Metcalfe, well-known technologist and founder of 3Com, who stated that the value of a network increases proportionately to the square of the number of users. In essence, the power of the network is greater than the sum of its parts, making the Internet of Everything, incredibly powerful.


You can read more here.

See Also:


Saturday 13 October 2012

Imagine the Future - by Cisco

Here is a video from Cisco from the last year, that I think is still relevant to help put in perspective where the future is going:




There is also a slide cast worth watching on the same topic from last month:



Friday 14 October 2011

Gartner Hype Cycle - Internet of Things


Click on the picture to enlarge

Interesting pic showing the Hype Cycle for different technologies. I picked it up from this interesting presentation on Internet Of Things here.

Monday 18 July 2011

Infographic on 'The Internet of Things'


Very interesting Infographic from Cisco on the 'Internet of Things' that we have discussed before.

Since its not possible for me to put the whole Infographic here, you can check it out on Cisco blogs.

Friday 25 March 2011

Interesting M2M Video by ETSI

Machine-to Machine Communications - David Boswarthick (15/02/2011) from ETSI – World Class Standards on Vimeo.

ETSI M2M: Building the Internet of Things

Presented by: David Boswarthick, ETSI Technical Expert

Live Presentation during MWC 2011: ETSI stand, Monday, 15 February 2011

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

About the presenter:

David Boswarthick, Technical Officer, ETSI

David has been extensively involved for over 10 years in the standardization activities of mobile, fixed and convergent networks in both the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). He is currently involved in the M2M standards group which is defining an end to end architecture and requirements for multiple M2M applications including Smart Metering, healthcare and enhanced home living. David holds a Bachelor's Honours Degree in Telecommunications from the University of Plymouth, and a Master's Degree in Networks and Distributed systems from the University of Nice and Sophia Antipolis, France.

Monday 28 February 2011

More than 50 Billion Connected Devices

I blogged about the 50 Billion connected devices as predicted by Ericsson last year. With the promised 'Internet of things' and 'connected world' we may see 50 billion devices not too far in the near future. Here is a recent whitepaper from Ericsson on this topic.


Thursday 13 January 2011

RAN mechanisms to avoid CN overload due to MTC

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) is the future and Machine-type communications (MTC) will be very important once we have billions of connected devices. I have talked in the past about the 50 Billion connected devices by 2050 and the Internet of Things.

One of the challenges of today's networks is to handle this additional signalling traffic due to MTC. One of the very important topics being discussed in 3GPP RAN meetings is 'RAN mechanisms to avoid CN overload due to MTC'. Even though it has not been finalised, its interesting to see the direction in which things are moving.

The above figure from R2-106188 shows that an extended wait time could be added in the RRC Connection Reject/Release message in case if the eNodeB is overloaded. The device can reattempt the connection once the wait time has expired.


In R2-110462, another approach is shown where Core Network (CN) is overloaded. Here a NAS Request message is sent with delay tolerant indicator a.k.a. low priority indicator. If the CN is overloaded then it can reject the request with a backoff timer. Another approach would be to send this info to the eNodeB that can do a RRC Connection Reject when new connection request is received.

All Documents from 3GPP RAN2 #72-bis are available here. Search for NIMTC for M2M related and overload related docs.

Monday 13 December 2010

6LoWPAN: Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks

From Wikipedia: 6lowpan is an acronym of IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks, or (as the "personal" qualification is no longer relevant), IPv6 over LoW Power wireless Area Networks. 6lowpan is the name of a working group in the internet area of the IETF. The 6lowpan group has defined encapsulation and header compression mechanisms that allow IPv6 packets to be sent to and received from over IEEE 802.15.4 based networks. IPv4 and IPv6 are the work horses for data delivery for local-area networks, metropolitan area networks, and wide-area networks such as the Internet.

There is a book from Wiley entitled "6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet", which has a good definition and explanation of 6LoWPAN that I am using below. Wiley has excerpt from the book that details the complete introductory chapter.

As the Internet of routers, servers and personal computers has been maturing, another Internet revolution has been going on – The Internet of Things (see pic below). The vision behind the Internet of Things is that embedded devices, also called smart objects, are universally becoming IP enabled, and an integral part of the Internet. Examples of embedded devices and systems using IP today range from mobile phones, personal health devices and home automation, to industrial automation, smart metering and environmental monitoring systems. The scale of the Internet of Things is already estimated to be immense, with the potential of trillions of devices becoming IP-enabled. The impact of the Internet of Things will be significant, with the promise of better environmental monitoring, energy savings, smart grids, more efficient factories, better logistics, better healthcare and smart homes.


The Internet of Things can be understood as a layer of digital information that covers the physical world. Objects and places become part of the Internet of Things in two ways: First, data and information can be associated with a particular location, using geo-coordinates or a street address. Second with sensors and RFID tags or transmitters installed in these objects allowing then to be accessed via Internet protocols.

Remember, Ericsson has already predicted 50 Billion connected devices by 2050. See here.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) released the 802.15.4 lowpower wireless personal area network (WPAN) standard in 2003, which was a major milestone, providing the first global low-power radio standard. Soon after, the ZigBee Alliance developed a solution for ad hoc control networks over IEEE 802.15.4, and has produced a lot of publicity about the applications of wireless embedded technology. ZigBee and proprietary networking solutions that are vertically bound to a link-layer and application profiles only solve a small portion of the applications for wireless embedded networking. They also have problems with scalability, evolvability and Internet integration.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard released in 2003 was the biggest factor leading to 6LoWPAN standardization. For the first time a global, widely supported standard for lowpower wireless embedded communications was available [IEEE802.15.4]. The popularity of this new standard gave the Internet community the needed encouragement to standardize an IP adaptation for such wireless embedded links.

The ideal use of 6LoWPAN is in applications where:
• embedded devices need to communicate with Internet-based services,
• low-power heterogeneous networks need to be tied together,
• the network needs to be open, reusable and evolvable for new uses and services, and
• scalability is needed across large network infrastructures with mobility.

Connecting the Internet to the physical world enables a wide range of interesting applications where 6LoWPAN technology may be applicable, for example:
• home and building automation
• healthcare automation and logistics
• personal health and fitness
• improved energy efficiency
• industrial automation
• smart metering and smart grid infrastructures
• real-time environmental monitoring and forecasting
• better security systems and less harmful defense systems
• more flexible RFID infrastructures and uses
• asset management and logistics
• vehicular automation

One interesting example application of 6LoWPAN is in facility management, which is the management of large facilities using a combination of building automation, asset management and other embedded systems. This quickly growing field can benefit from 6LoWPAN, is feasible with today’s technology, and has real business demand.

You can read more from the book on Wiley's website here.

More information on purchasing and reviews on Amazon's website below: