Industy 4.0

Internet of Things (IoT) needs communication. Without a correspondingly efficient communication medium, things remainjust simply things.

What networks IoT communication needs?

The requirements for communications solutions in the IoT sector are highly dependent on the application scenario. In general, you must first distinguish between three different scenarios:

  • Power and data connection are available through direct wiring.
  • The power supply can be ensured by a cable – the data connection must be established over radio.
  • There can be no cabling: Self-contained power supply and wireless communication technology is required.

The third scenario (autonomous power supply and wireless communication) undoubtedly represents themost stringent requirements, but also offers the greatest chance to connect things and allows, through analysis and evaluation of the data, new data-related improvements and new business models.

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are called networks that will soon allow millions, or even billions of devices to communicate with each other, with higher-level systems or with the “Cloud”.

  • Low Power Wide Area Networks

    Currently, there are a wide range of technical options on how the equipment of the “Internet ofthings” can communicate.

    At the moment, LoRa and Sigfox received the most attention, however, the race for LPWAN is still far from being decided. There are a large number of competitors, some already have an installed base of several million devices:

What technology do I need?

There are currently many different vendors with different products,protocols, networks and interfaces. At this point, no one can stimulateseriously, which standard will prevail.

As a vendor-independent integration expert, we offer comprehensive expertise for end-to-end implementation, and we can support youfrom strategy to the go-live.

MIOTY (Fraunhofer IIS)

  • MIOTY uses an efficient channel encoding scheme that increases its range by a factor of 10 over standard 868 MHz wireless systems (up to 40 km).
  • Because it generates little self-interference, the system can support as many as one million simultaneous transmitters.
  • The transmitters are based on commercially-available chips from manufacturers such as Chipcon and Silabs and feature a compact design and extended battery operation (up to 15 years).
  • The receivers, which are equipped with digital signal processors, have a flexible design that allows them to be adapted to specific customer applications.
  • They can be used with either stationary or mobile applications and can be optimized for both environments.
  • MIOTY is furthermore resistant to interference within its own frequency band, consumes minimal energy and saves battery power.

For more information about wireless IoT platform MIOTY.

s-net (Fraunhofer IIS)

  • Sensor network based on nodes of sensors distributed spatially, which, independently of each other, and – depending on the application – also interact with existing infrastructure through radio waves.
  • In contrast to conventional technologies, such as RFID, wireless sensor networks can communicate actively and bidirectional, and do not require activation by a reading device.
  • Freely customizable protocol characteristics and extremely low power consumption.
  • Suitable for large-scale, distributed data acquisition or data collection.
  • Suitable for locating people and objects.

Further information on the self-organizing sensor network s-net.