Mobile operators are pinning their hopes on the M2M-optimized implementation of LTE, LTE-M, to give them a strong role in supporting smart city services such as smart lighting, which require wide area connectivity at very low power. But an equally important weapon for them may be LTE Direct, a peer-to-peer technology which supports localized services, within 500 meters of the user, without the need to go via a base station.
That has the potential to combine the targeted, personalized services of a Bluetooth beacon, with the privacy and security of a licensed-band network, and is being trialled by companies like Facebook as a way to track users and target them with promotions or updates. It is also being used in one of the world’s largest smart city efforts, in New York City, where it will be combined with WiFi and other technologies in the LinkNYC roll-out. While WiFi will be the main enabler of ubiquitous broadband for city applications, LTE Direct will support proximity services, delivering highly targeted services and information to citizens.
LTE Direct discovers large numbers of devices far more quickly than Bluetooth Low Energy, say its backers, though it will not be fully available for another year. This is the challenge for the whole LTE family – technologies which are optimized for the smart city are only just emerging, and meanwhile the first cities to connect their infrastructure, their vehicle and their citizens wirelessly are doing so with what is available now. That ranges from WiFi for broadband applications to BLE beacons to narrowband systems specifically designed for low power, wide area city applications.
That segment is becoming a busy one, with several would-be de facto standards vying for the lead. Many of these use UltraNarrowBand approaches in the ISM bands (868MHz or 900MHz) and include Sigfox; the LoRa Alliance; Neul’s Weightless technology, now owned by Huawei; and Plextek’s implementation of UNB.
Sigfox has gained the highest profile so far, but LoRa has founded an industry alliance around itself, and Swisscom this week announced a city project based on that technology. The telco has built a low power WAN to support IoT and smart city trials and services. It uses the LoRa technology and is designed to run alongside Swisscom’s existing M2M network (wired and GSM) and communicate with it.
Jaap Vossen, head of M2M sales and marketing at the operator, said: We are making innumerable new M2M applications across all segments possible in one go. For example, the networking of everyday devices such as sensors, water dispensers, waste bins and letterboxes. The user is notified in real time when the post has arrived, for instance.” The system will also support services such as fleet management and mobile payments for Swisscom’s enterprise customers.
Meanwhile Neul, which transferred its efforts from the TV white spaces spectrum to the ISM band, is somewhat behind the others. However, its chips have been dubbed ‘LTE-M’ by Huawei and so its technologies seem destined to be converged into the vendor’s cellular ‘4.5G’ efforts rather than surviving independently (though the Weightless SIG, the industry group backing its technology, could in theory carry it forward outside of Huawei).
Any technology will need a degree of scale to move beyond tailored, one-off projects into the mass market and the goal of repeatable, cost-efficient roll-outs. That will see consolidation, and two UNB players, Telensa and Senaptic, are to merge to increase their weight when competing with rivals like Sigfox, or with cellular solutions.
Both companies were formed as spin-outs from Plextek. Telensa was created in 2005 and its key offering is PLANet for Lighting, a bidirectional radio system for controlling street lighting across a city. Senaptic was set up last year, in order to commercialize smart city services based on the latter’s implementation of UNB in the ISM bands.
In this crowded space, the newly merged UK-based entity, which will use the Telensa name, will focus on providing multiple city-wide M2M systems based on the same core platform. Initially, the focus is particularly on smart lighting and parking, areas in which both firms already have commercial deployments. The firm is promising “a complete proposition for businesses and governments looking to create smart cities using secure networks”, which will evolve during the coming year.
Telensa’s CEO Will Gibson said in a statement: “Our dominance of the UK market for smart street lighting has led to major new global engagements and our customers are inevitably looking to us to extend the range of IoT applications we offer. That is why combining Telensa with Senaptic’s smart city platform is so compelling”. Telensa says that 10% of the UK’s street lights are managed by its systems and the Senaptic platform and services teams – and engagements in various countries including Russia – will help it to expand worldwide.
Also in the UK, the south-western city of Bristol is becoming a beacon of smart city advances. Under its broad Bristol is Open initiative – a collaboration between the city council and Bristol University – several public/private projects are underway. One is the creation of a software defined network by NEC, which will collect and analyze data from huge numbers of sensors and city applications such as air quality management (see Wireless Watch March 12 2015).
Another is a smart lighting roll-out led by Silver Spring Networks (SSN), which will initially see 1,500 city center lamp posts installed with SSN sensors. Of these, 1,200 will be spread evenly across the city, while the remaining 300 will be installed more densely along the ‘Brunel mile’. The 1,200 will act as WiFi nodes in a city-wide mesh network, and the 300, also WiFi enabled, are to be used to test more advanced smart city capabilities. The nodes will use the 802.15.4g protocol – the smart utility variant of the short range, low data rate standard, also known as Wi-SUN and targeted at sub-1GHz spectrum. This supports speeds measured in kilobits per second, but range of 10 miles.
Worlwide, SSN claims it has installed over 20m connected devices using its IPv6-based SilverLink sensor platform and intelligent lighting system. In most SSN deployments, the WiFi nodes which comprise the mesh network are installed, along with an array of sensors, into existing street lighting infrastructure. The advantages of this approach include an existing power supply, which reduces the installation costs. The sensors collect a variety of data from traffic flow, air quality, public transportation and other systems.
The Bristol project aims to build the most advanced, city-wide network infrastructure to date. The mesh of WiFi nodes will be backhauled by fiber and spectrum will be provisioned through a cloud management system. The data will be managed and processed on the BlueCrystal 2 supercomputer at the University of Bristol, running CityOS, an operating system designed specifically to handle the M2M communications throughout the smart-city network, which was developed by Professor Dimitria Simeonidou. Big data analytics will be leveraged in a variety of sectors – traffic and energy management, health and crime trends, targeted advertising, new business generation, as well as allowing citizens to interact with the city in new ways.
Silver Spring often steps in when a city is considering the upgrade from analog to digital lighting anyway. There is a compelling business case to be made that, for only a little more expenditure, a city can reap the rewards of new LED lights, with all the additional benefits of IoT sensors included. This service model can quickly provide an expansive sensor network for relatively little outlay, with SSN generating recurring revenues in managing the platform-as-a-service (PaaS).