Recent IoT Trends
From a technical perspective, we are seeing consistent trends across success-
ful implementations:
1. Successful IoT projects are increasing intelligence and analytics capabili-
ties at the edge, with the ability to act locally and autonomously. This
means they can answer the following questions:
• What information is contextually interesting?
• What action should be taken as a result?
• What should be communicated or shared?
• Is it urgent, or can it wait?
2. Successful IoT projects are leveraging improved sensors that have longer
battery life, a smaller form factor and falling unit costs.
3. Successful IoT projects are increasing communication ranges and capa-
bilities, while simultaneously decreasing communication costs.
While traditional sensors based on the WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
protocols continue to gain traction, we are also seeing increased adoption of
longer range solutions, such as LoRa, Sigfox, LTE-M and Narrowband IoT
(NB-IoT).
Let us talk about some of these emerging standards. First and foremost, they
have common attributes:
• They are low-power (with battery life measured in months, or even
years)
• They are relatively long-distance (think kilometers vs. meters)
• They are designed for moving small quantities of data (think bits
and bytes vs. megabits and gigabytes).
In many uses cases, a meager 50 megabyte per month data plan will suffice.
Think about that in comparison to your monthly smartphone data plan con-
sumption, where you may be blowing through 5-10 gigabytes (or at least your
kids are).
By contrast, WiFi is a short-range, power-hungry protocol that is well-suited to
high-bandwidth applications. BLE, on the other hand, is a short-range, pow-
er-sipping protocol that is a better fit for low-bandwidth use cases. Both also
have low-cost licensing fees.
In an effort to further extend battery life and decrease unit costs, devices
leveraging the newer protocols are typically designed to be relatively “dumb” —
with limited onboard analytics or event processing capabilities — and are
intended to work either independently or with a gateway.
44 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018