Technologies

The plethora of connectivity options available on the market is great news for everyone wanting to launch their first IoT projects or boost the existing deployments. Yet, this abundance doesn’t exactly make the choice of the right solution any easier. Quite the reverse: with so many possibilities around, finding the one that best suits your project specifics may seem a daunting challenge.
The main network technologies for IoT Connectivity are:
– Standard Wireless Access – WiFi, 2G, 3G and standard LTE.
– Private Long Range – LoRA , Zigbee, Tinymesh, 6loWPAN, Bluetooth.
– Mobile IoT Technologies – LTE-M, NB-IoT, and EC-GSM-IoT.

GSM/GPRS

With a long history of use going a way back to the traditional M2M connectivity environments, wireless cellular communication remains the backbone for many IoT use cases and a popular choice among the Internet of Things service providers and device manufacturers. By granting the widest possible coverage with a whopping bandwidth to support it , cellular networks are able to face the current challenges of streaming high-definition media to devices that are either connected to an electricity supply or easily rechargeable

WiFi

WiFi, or 802.11, is a wireless protocol that was built with the intent of replacing Ethernet using wireless communication over unlicensed bands. Its goal was to provide off-the-shelf, easy to implement, easy to use short-range wireless connectivity with cross-vendor interoperability

ZigBee

The ZigBee wireless technology is basically a openly available global standard to address the uniques needs of low-power, low-cost wireless M2M(machine-to-machine) networks and also Internet-of-Things(IoT). It operates on IEEE 802.15

LoRa

LoRa (short for long range) is a spread spectrum modulation technique derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology. Semtech’s LoRa devices and wireless radio frequency technology is a long range, low power wireless platform that has become the de facto technology for Internet of Things (IoT) networks worldwide. LoRa devices and the open LoRaWAN® protocol enable smart IoT applications that solve some of the biggest challenges facing our planet: energy management, natural resource reduction, pollution control, infrastructure efficiency, disaster prevention, and more. Semtech’s LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol have amassed several hundred known uses cases for smart cities, smart homes and buildings, smart agriculture, smart metering, smart supply chain and logistics, and more. With well over 100 million devices connected to networks in 100 countries and growing, LoRa devices are the DNA of IoT, creating a Smarter Planet.

Tinymesh

Tinymesh is a powerful multi-hop mesh protocol with bi-directional wireless communication for control and monitoring of individual nodes. The compact modules provide a self-configuring and self-healing mesh network, giving large area coverage for your application. Radiocrafts has supplied Tinymesh modules to large smart metering networks, as well as street lighting and industrial sensor systems.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is everywhere: in speakers, wireless headphones, cars, wearables, medical devices, and even shoes! ... Since many IoT systems involve small devices and sensors, BLE has become the more common protocol of the two (versus Bluetooth Classic) in IoT.

6loWPAN

6LoWPAN is a wireless / IoT style standard that has quietly gained significant ground. ... With the world migrating towards IPv6 packet data, a system such 6LoWPAN offers many advantages for low power wireless sensor networks and other forms of low power wireless networks.

RFID

Radio frequency identification system (RFID) is an automatic technology and aids machines or computers to identify objects, record metadata or control individual target through radio waves. Connecting RFID reader to the terminal of Internet, the readers can identify, track and monitor the objects attached with tags globally, automatically, and in real time, if needed. This is the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). RFID is often seen as a prerequisite for the IoT.