LTE Category-0 low power M2M devices

While we have talked about different LTE categories, especially higher speeds, we have not yet discussed Category-0 or Cat-0 for M2M.

A recent news report stated the following:

CAT-1 and CAT-0 are lower speed and power versions of the LTE standard which dramatically extend the addressable market for carriers and chip makers alike. They introduce new IoT targeted features, extend battery operation and lower the cost of adding LTE connectivity.

“While chipsets supporting these lower categories are essential for numerous applications, including wearable devices, smart home and smart metering, there has been an industry development gap that we had anticipated two years ago,” said Eran Eshed, co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development at Altair. “We’ve worked hard to address this gap by being first to market with true CAT-1 and 0 chipsets featuring a power/size/cost combination that is a massive game-changer.”

Ericsson has an interesting presentation that talks about LTE evolution for cellular IoT. While Rel-12 Cat-0 would use the normal allocated bandwidth (upto 20MHz), Rel-13 plans further enhancements to save even more power by reducing the bandwidth to 1.4Mhz. Another possible saving of power comes from the use of Half Duplex (but its optional). There is a very interesting presentation from Mstar semiconductors on half duplex that I have blogged about here. Anyway, the presentation from Ericsson is here:

When we talk about 50 billion M2M devices, a question that I regularly ask is how many of them will be using cellular and how many will use other technologies. Its good to see that my skepticism is shared by others as well, see the tweet below.

@disruptivedean @ericsson Re 2% only cellular, I was discussing this the other day. Too many competing techs. pic.twitter.com/Z7s6wqxkBM
— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) January 26, 2015

Click on the pic.twitter.com/Z7s6wqxkBM to see the actual media.

Nokia has also got an interesting whitepaper on this topic which talks about optimizing LTE and the architectural evolution that will lead cellular LTE to become a compelling technology so that it can be widely adopted. That paper is embedded as well below.

Nokia LTE M2M: Optimizing LTE for the Internet of Things from Zahid Ghadialy