Practical Overview of Communication Technologies for Industrial IoT Applications
Jiri Hosek
Associate Professor and Deputy Vice-Head for R&D and International Relations
Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology
Czech Republic
Abstract
Today, about 6.5 billion “things” are connected to the Internet. And while this sounds like a lot, still less than 1% of all the things, that are around us and could be connected, are really utilizing this opportunity. Hence, the question is why all these devices are not equipped with wireless connectivity? In some cases, they are either too remote, too inaccessible, or there is simply too many of them to make it economically viable. To mitigate this gap, promising communication technologies emerge, which have the potential to become enablers for true mass IoT market. In this talk, we provide a practical perspective on dominant Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) network technologies, while challenging them to fulfill the key requirements of (critical) industrial IoT applications. Later, we will focus primarily on the 3GPP Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology supporting low data rate massive connections, enhanced coverage, reduced cost and complexity, ultra-low power consumption, and flexible delay characteristics. Moreover, we will reveal our prototype design of the NB-IoT device and outline the architecture challenges as well as the configuration required on the side of a mobile operator to have NB-IoT communication ready to take off. Finally, we summarize the NB-IoT radio coverage as well energy efficiency results obtained during the extensive measurement campaigns undertaken within the long-term cooperation with our industrial partners.
Biography
Dr. Jiri Hosek is an Associate Professor and Deputy Vice-Head for R&D and International Relations at Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. Jiri is also coordinating the WISLAB research group (http://wislab.cz), where he deals mostly with industry-oriented R&D projects in the area of future mobile networks, Internet of Things and home automation services. Jiri (co-) authored more than 80 research works on networking technologies, wireless communications, quality of service, quality of experience and IoT applications including those published in the IEEE Communications Magazine. Jiri is an experienced speaker regularly participating and actively presenting his research work on premier international conferences and workshops.