Electricity + Control February 2017

CONTROL SYSTEMS + AUTOMATION

ADR – Adaptive Data Rate AES GSM – Groupe Speciale Mobile IoT – Internet of Things

– Advanced Encryption Standard

LPWA – Low Power Wide Area M2M – Machine-to-Machine R&D – Research & Development SNR – Signal-to-Noise Ratio TCP/IP – Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol WAN – Wide-Area Network

Abbreviations/Acronyms

Leading industry research [2] predicts that glob- ally, there will be approximately three billion de- vices connected to LPWA networks by 2023. The anticipated mass adoption of this technology is set to drive down hardware costs, densify network coverage and promote healthy competition among service providers.

without requiring detailed knowledge of the final deployment location of the device i.e. proximity to nearest proprietary network concentrator or mesh node. For applications requiring low data throughput, LPWA networks offer a solution that has the ubiquitous coverage of GSM/3 G, with the low device cost and battery life (> 10 years) of short-range wireless systems. Essentially, the best of both worlds! Companies no longer need to deploy their own proprietary low-power networks, but can rather leverage off a dedicated network provider, freeing them from the burden of managing complex communication platforms, and allowing them to focus on core operations. In addition to this, LPWA network providers are able to amortise capital investments and offset operational costs by addressing the entire Internet-of-Things (IoT) market (municipal, industrial, enterprise and consumer). This results in wide coverage and competitive pricing, offering the lowest total cost of ownership to users and solution providers. The mass adoption of LPWA technology will promote greater standardisation between device manufacturers and vendors. Once the ecosystem is in place, users will have the option to replace under- performing devices with a competing brand, without sacrificing net- work connectivity or operational integrity, provided the replacement device is supported by the user’s back-end software applications. This will help stimulate healthy price competition in the device market and enforce accountability. In parallel to this, device manufacturers will benefit from a reduction in core component costs due to economies- of-scale, as LPWA technology is widely adopted globally. Very little is ‘new’ when it comes to LPWA network technology, and one could argue that the capability to implement such networks has been around for many years. The emergence of LPWA networks is analogous to that of GSM networks in the early 90s. Long range two-way radios were extensively used as far back as World War II, but it took another 40 years for batteries, semiconductors and manu- facturing techniques to advance to a point where mass adoption of cellular technology started to become technically and economically feasible. This encouraged cooperation in a highly fragmented sector, eventually culminating in the formation of the Groupe SpecialeMobile (GSM) [5] in 1982, which standardised the GSM protocol. This paved the way for mobile network operators and technology companies to invest a large amount of resources into network deployment and handset development. The rest, as they say, is history. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems have steadily gained trac- tion over the years, with solutions generally focussed at selected business verticals. The cost and power consumption of sensors and If LPWA networks are so powerful, where have they been?

Figure 2: Predicted growth of LPWA networks [3].

How LPWA networks will benefit industry There are countless solutions already available to address the wireless sensing and control market, some of which have been in operation for many years, with good operational track records. The move to- wards LPWA networks should not be viewed as a drastic shift from current methods, but should rather be seen as the next evolution in wireless data collection techniques, based largely on widely available and trusted technologies. In fact, several leading products currently employing LPWA radio technology have come from trusted manu- facturers (www.homeridersystems.com), who are well-positioned in the wireless telemetry market, but have recognised the vast array of benefits associated with utilising LPWA networks. A major benefit of LPWA radio networks over traditional short- range deployments is the fact that each transmission is generally received by more than one network concentrator (usually several) simultaneously, thereby adding redundancy to the network. This is a powerful feature of distributed asynchronous networks, and is known as ‘spatial diversity’ − which decreases susceptibility to in- terference, mitigates fading effects, and substantially increases the statistical probability of successful packet reception [4]. Another major paradigm shift that LPWA systems offer over current low-power solu- tions, is the ability to preconfigure a device for network connectivity,

February ‘17 Electricity+Control

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