A new wireless technology may cause Internet of Things (IoT) designers to take another look at their wireless options. In case you haven’t noticed, the emphasis in industrial IoT (IIoT) has shifted from high speed/short range to just the opposite: long range/low power. LPWAN (low-power wide-area network) is the term used to refer to these standards. Now there’s one more alternative to consider: MIOTY. Here’s a quick look at this segment of IIoT wireless and an introduction to the new option.
The LPWAN Option
The traditional wireless standards like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee continue to thrive in the IoT world. However, some designers have slowly shifted their attention to the growing number of low-power, long-range, low-data-rate wireless standards. This is particularly true in industrial IoT. The most well-known standards are LoRa, LTE-M, NB-IoT, Sigfox, and Weightless. The almost unknown IEEE standard 802.11ah (HaLow) and 802.11af are also in the mix.
These standards support all applications that require very remote monitoring and control. Some of these applications include sensors for environmental recording, remote pipeline status, condition of distant storage facilities, or even utility monitoring.
Sensor readings are widely spaced out from a few minutes to hours apart. That implies there’s no immediate need to get them back to the monitoring gateway quickly. What’s more important is that the battery life of the remote sensor node is very long, like years. So low power consumption is a must. All of the newer LPWAN technologies have features that fit these application scenarios.
MIOTY Summary
So, where does MIOTY fit? Here are the highlights of this new contender:
- Range: 5 km and up to 15 km given a clear line-of-sight (LOS) path.
- Operating frequencies: 868 to 928 MHz, unlicensed bands.
- Data rate: 512 bits/s
- Data payload: Flexible from 10 to 192 bytes
- Efficient channel encoding that provides 10X boosts in range
- Link budget: −154 dB (−140 dBm receiver)
- Security: AES-128
The PHY and MAC layers of the protocol are standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) TS-103-357. You can get that as a free download for more details.
The standard has been implemented and tested with a Texas Instruments’ CC1310 wireless microcontroller. It is part of TI’s SimpleLink sub-1-GHz product line. Others like Silicon Labs with sub-1-GHz ISM band radios might be tempted to address this technology.
Vendor Consideration
Another vendor supporting MIOTY is BehrTech. Its offering is called MYTHINGS. MYTHINGS is a hardware agnostic, interoperable, and integrable wireless connectivity platform that addresses the IIoT space. MYTHINGS includes MIOTY’s patented Telegram Splitting Ultra-Narrow Band (TS-UNB) that’s part of this LPWAN technology standardized by ETSI. MYTHINGS networks use a star topology with a base station that can aggregate data from up to one million remote sensors. The base station delivers the captured data to inhouse data centers or remote servers in the cloud.
MIOTY is designed to use existing IC transmitters and special DSP-based software-defined radio (SDR) receivers. Anyway, something new to contemplate if you’re studying the wireless choices.