Modern Radios — Miles of Range and Years of Battery Life?
Age old definition of radios relates to ‘radios drain battery’. Radios radiate energy into space. The more energy they use to transmit, the further their signal will travel. Recently read an article on how the developers faced trouble a decade ago, making a technology having a trade off between battery life and signal range. You can either build a Bluetooth sensor with a great battery life but have only thirty feet of range or a cellular sensor with infinite range but you would need to recharge it every week.
A few years ago, a new set of radio protocols arrived with a bang. These Long Range Radios had insane features: very long range of transmission, minimal cost, license free radio frequency spectrum and battery performance with a boost.
So far we have known plenty of short-hop radios (BT, ZigBee, Z-Wave) and next up are their big sisters, the medium-hop radios. These radio protocols take the same idea of a self-controlled wireless network, and give you much longer ranges. Since they have wide range, and low power, they are called LPWANs for “low power wide area networks”
Several standards hit the market like LoRa, SigFox, Ingenu, NB-IoT, LTE-M and a few others, with LoRa, Ingenu and SigFox in the lead.
How do they work?
Each standard uses a different technique to maximize range while minimizing transmission power. Sigfox uses a well-known modulation technique, but transmits slowly in a very narrow band of spectrum to maximize signal penetration. LoRa radios use a modulation technique that can find signal well below the noise floor. Ingenu uses their own novel form of spread spectrum modulation.
Put simply, these radios do some crazy math.
In fact, most of the underlying radio technology here isn’t new — the techniques for encoding signals were invented decades ago. What’s new is that the math has been committed to silicon, and is being produced in scale. So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device.
What’s the downside?
You can send lots of sensor data, but you won’t be streaming Netflix. LPWAN does not replace Wi-Fi or cellular.
On the flip side
Unlike cellular, a single tower or base station might support tens of thousands of devices. So these networks are built to scale on quantity of devices supported, not on bandwidth per device.
They’re built to support billions of battery-powered wireless sensors.
There’s a second advantage to transmitting at low power: access to unlicensed spectrum.
You can’t blast at high power levels on unlicensed spectrum without screwing up cordless phones and Wi-Fi routers. But when you’re dribbling out a low-power signal, as LPWAN radios do, unlicensed frequencies become an option.
All of these radios can operate on unlicensed wireless spectrum. So the radios are cheap and the spectrum is free. When you consider that buying cellular licenses to cover the US would cost billions of dollars, that’s a pretty big deal.
It means that anyone can deploy an LPWAN network, no license required. With a couple of gateways, you can build your very own network to cover a corporate campus or basement or farm where cellular doesn’t reach, and run thousands of devices on it.
It also means that, with a relatively modest investment, new companies can become wireless carriers for IoT devices. I expect we’ll see a number of new carrier-style IoT networks built in the next few years, if only because the barriers are so low. Some cellular companies are even starting to build test networks, though mostly in Europe where competition is more intense.
A few years ago when this technology arrived, nobody knew much about it mainly because most of it was only technical but in the last few years these standards are changing the face of IoT.
These networks can reach for many miles outdoors, even in high-density cities. They’re perfect in country-sides, rural and semi-urban spots, especially if you have the ability to set up a directional antenna in a high spot. What’s great about all of them is there’s no complex pairing, connection or authentication overhead (unless you want it) so you can wake up your setup and start transmitting within milliseconds.
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