Connectivity Technology Blog

It's that time of the year when we look back to see which posts did well and which didn't. Here are the top 5 posts from this year, most popular first. 1.  CSI-RS vs SRS Beamforming , March 2021 2.  Why Starlink is Already a Gamechanger , March 2021 3.  Ericsson Explains Internet of Drones and 3GPP UAV Roadmap , August 2021 4.  LTE vs 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) , April 2021 5.  Cellular Connectivity Technology Landscape and Standards for Industrial IoT , September 2021 Here are three bonus posts that made it to the top 5 but they were posted before 2021: A. High-level Architecture Introduction of Mobile Cellular Networks from 2G to 5G , August 2019 B.  IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT), a.k.a. Wi-Fi 7 , November 2020 C.  5G Connectivity will Enable New Use Cases , May 2020 Related Posts : Free 6G Training: Top 5 Posts for 2021 Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Top 5 Posts for 2021 Operator Watch Blog: Top 5 Posts for 2021 The 3G4G Blog: Top...

One of the main requirements for 5G to be usable in Industry 4.0 scenarios is that it must be able to replicate the deterministic and low-latency nature of communication that would be expected as in case of wired networking. Last year, Devaki Chandramouli, Work Item Rapporteur at 3GPP, wrote an article titled, '5G for Industry 4.0'. Quoting from the article: In order to be able to deploy 5G for new and diverse use cases, including industry 4.0 and factory automation, the 5G system must work in harmony with the communications technologies used in such industries. For this purpose, 3GPP has now made significant progress towards the integration of the 5G system with IEEE 802.1 working group specifications covering Time Sensitive Networking (TSN). The ‘Vertical_LAN’ work item, in 3GPP Release-16, introduces the following three new and distinct 5G enablers for Industry 4.0; Support for Time Sensitive Communications by seamlessly integrating the 5G system as a bridge to IEEE TSN. Sup...

With the 5G and NB-IoT hype in full swing, people can be forgiven when they think that NB-IoT is the dominant technology for the Internet of Things. More shocking for some people is the fact that there are no 50 billion IoT devices yet , even when non-cellular IoT technologies are included. At the recently concluded 5G Techritory conference, Jans Jelinskis, Technical Director, 1NCE highlighted the fact that finally, customers are coming round to the idea that there will be no 2G network in the future, so the future of cellular IoT will be 4G. While many of the existing IoT requirements are still getting satisfied by the 2G simplicity, plan B also includes other non-cellular LPWA IoT technologies like LoRaWAN & Sigfox. Time will tell which of these will succeed and which of them will disappear into oblivion. Here is the video of the talk Related Posts :  The 3G4G Blog: Are there 50 Billion IoT Devices yet? Connectivity Technology Blog: The Potential of Connectivity Technologies ...

Interest in zero-energy/low-energy IoT is gaining ground as the industry tries to introduce more of these with minimal impact to the environment. A research team of IMDEA Networks Institute has introduced Internet of Things (IoT) devices that communicate without any batteries and harvest energy and receive data through visible light. A news article reported: This represents a new step towards making battery-free devices a reality, through the convergence of two emerging technologies: LiFi and radio frequency (RF) backscatter. Potential applications include smart homes, smart cities, and smart agriculture. It is expected that more than 64 billion IoT devices will be deployed by 2025, and they will work with batteries. The chemical components of these batteries threaten to have a huge environmental impact on the Earth. There is a pressing need to find a solution for removing the batteries without affecting communication performance and IoT services. IMDEA researchers propose that IoT de...