The Rise of the Trillion-Node Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been heralded as the second phase of the internet, promising to bring the transformative technology’s business model from the digital to the physical world. Yet, despite its potential to generate tens of trillions of dollars in economic value, the IoT has continually fallen short of analyst expectations. The most basic limitation has been one of scale – realizing such enormous value requires wireless networks with such a high volume of sensors that they fundamentally challenge the boundaries of today’s technological capabilities.
One of the first-order scaling problems of the IoT is power. Trillions of sensors would require trillions of batteries, setting the world on a hamster wheel of battery maintenance that is simply too prohibitive from a cost, logistics, and sustainability standpoint to justify the benefits. For this reason and others, the trillion-node IoT must eliminate the battery.
Everactive has solved the battery problem with custom integrated circuits that operate entirely and continuously on low levels of harvested ambient energy, resulting in always-on, self-sustaining, and battery-free wireless sensors.
Overcoming the Wireless Networking Challenge
After solving the power problem, the next technological challenge is wireless networking. Specifically, leveraging a wireless protocol that can not only operate at a low enough power budget to keep the battery out of the equation, but also simultaneously support a high density of devices, reliable communication, and low latency.
Everactive’s proprietary Evernet protocol delivers all of these features within the company’s patented batteryless footprint. Evernet leverages Everactive’s always-on ultra-low power (ULP) receiver to handle all network synchronization traffic through an encrypted broadcast channel from its IoT gateways. This inverts the network, allowing every device to be constantly listening to every broadcasted gateway message, all the time. As a result, Evernet can pack in more devices with higher average throughput and low latency communication to any one device, all within a harvested energy budget.
Compared to state-of-the-art published research results, Everactive’s ULP receivers offer a 1000x reduction in power while maintaining the same level of wireless range. This breakthrough in power efficiency is a key enabler for realizing the trillion-node IoT.
Competing IoT Wireless Protocols
There are a number of wireless standards vying to be the IoT protocol, each with its own pros and cons. However, none of them are well-suited to support the trillion-node IoT:
| Protocol | Power Consumption | Range | Scalability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi and Cellular NB-IoT | Too high to operate from a harvested power budget | Good | Poor |
| Bluetooth and Zigbee | Lower power, but poor range and limited scalability | Poor | Poor |
| LoRa and Sigfox | Lower power, but low data rates | Good | Fair |
The common thread among these protocols is that they must duty-cycle their radios to achieve lower power consumption. This means their radios are off most of the time to save power, which results in higher latency, lower throughput, and significant power consumption for time synchronization.
Everactive’s always-on ULP receiver technology overcomes the disadvantages of duty-cycling, providing a continuously operating radio that simultaneously achieves larger scale networks, longer-range communication, and lower latency – all on a harvested energy budget.
The Role of 5G in the IoT Ecosystem
The 5G community is looking heavily at adding IoT standards to accommodate a wide range of low-power devices and applications. These applications are broadly categorized as massive machine type communication (mMTC), targeting huge numbers of low-power devices, as well as ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), targeting industrial control and autonomous vehicles.
Separate cellular IoT protocols are being developed to accommodate these two categories. However, even the IoT devices have strict performance requirements, such as accurate time synchronization, in order to avoid interference with incumbent devices.
Adopting protocols that take advantage of always-on ULP receivers, like Everactive’s Evernet, can fundamentally change how IoT devices connect to the cellular network in future 5G releases. This can provide the mechanism to bring long-anticipated digitization to massive amounts of physical-world assets and infrastructure.
Sensor Networks for the Industrial IoT
Manufacturing plants, refineries, and other large campuses seeking to reap the benefits of IoT technology are faced with an array of choices spanning the entire technology stack – from sensor devices to cloud analytics platforms. How data is transmitted from those devices to those cloud platforms is a critical piece of the puzzle that has significant implications for installations and maintenance, scalability, and data reliability.
Ultimately, choosing the right wireless network will play an important role in a solution’s total cost of ownership and generated return on investment. Sensor-networks.org has applied its decade-plus research and development in the field of low-power wireless communication to solving the scalability, reliability, and cost challenges associated with deploying high-density sensor networks.
The core ULP always-on receiver enables truly continuous operation, allowing customers to realize true real-time insight without duty-cycling to conserve battery life. With a several-hundred-meter non-line-of-sight range and a novel networking scheme that connects thousands of devices per gateway, Everactive delivers this insight with a minimal infrastructural footprint throughout customers’ sites.
The Future of Ambient IoT Devices
Beyond industrial applications, the evolution of ambient IoT devices enabled by 5G technology is another exciting development in the sensor network landscape. These are low-cost, battery-less devices that offer a high degree of adaptability, seamlessly communicating with each other to provide real-time data and insights.
The 5G Americas report highlights how the capabilities offered by 5G networks, such as high-speed data transfer, low latency, and the ability to handle many connected devices simultaneously, make 5G the perfect enabler for this next wave of device innovation. This includes the emergence of Reduced Capability (RedCap) devices, which bridge the gap between high-performance smartphones and low-power ambient IoT devices.
RedCap devices offer just enough computational power to perform specific tasks efficiently without draining resources or requiring a constant power supply. They could be the workhorses that will populate our smart factories, monitor our health, and manage our smart cities.
The Importance of Interoperability and Security
One of the key benefits of the Matter protocol, an industry-backed standard for smart home devices, is its focus on interoperability. Matter ensures that devices from various manufacturers can work seamlessly across different platforms, such as HomeKit, Google Home, and Alexa.
This interoperability not only simplifies the setup and everyday operation of smart home devices but also enhances user control and flexibility. Matter devices can be controlled using the user’s preferred voice assistant or platform, allowing different voice assistants to interact with the same device.
While security and privacy are always top concerns in the smart home domain, the core design of Matter addresses these issues. The protocol employs methods such as end-to-end encryption and data minimization to protect user privacy, ensuring minimal risk of information leakage. Additionally, Matter’s local control functionality reduces the risk of hacking and malware attacks by allowing commands to be directly transmitted to devices in the home network without going through cloud servers.
Conclusion: The Transformative Potential of Sensor Networks
The sensor network revolution is poised to transform a wide range of industries, from manufacturing and healthcare to transportation and smart cities. By overcoming the challenges of power, wireless networking, and interoperability, sensor networks and the IoT are unlocking unprecedented levels of efficiency, automation, and data-driven insights across the physical world.
As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see a proliferation of specialized, low-power, and battery-less IoT devices that seamlessly integrate with our everyday lives, ushering in a new era of intelligent connectivity. The future of sensor networks holds the promise of a more efficient, sustainable, and interconnected world, revolutionizing the way we live, work, and interact with our environment.