From the Influencers

Operators Need Revamped Approaches to Address IoT Revolution


November 18, 2015


The typical mobile carrier business model is fairly straightforward: Mainly, it’s about connecting smartphones and tablets, be they in a residential for an enterprise setting. But the coming Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity will require a shift in mobile operator business models and network approaches, to support new use cases that have very different requirements from the “there’s an app for that” human-based smart-device scenario.


“When it comes to the Internet of Things, operators are moving from a limited scope of network requirements and deployment issues to a much more complex scale and range of use cases,” explained Sam Lucero, an analyst with HIS, in an interview. “Whether it’s video surveillance and other high-bandwidth apps that need as close to zero latency as possible, or networks of environmental sensors that transmit small amounts of information frequently and need a long battery life, IoT will be a fundamentally different story for the mobile ecosystem to support.”

First and foremost, IoT deployments, especially in an industrial setting, will require a new set of network characteristics. Namely: Robustness, low latency, scale and battery life. And, IoT will drive new network management and OSS approaches, in order to manage all of those new devices, connections and data.

Network Improvements

When it comes to robustness, IoT applications will require greater coverage and density; after all, when a connection is supporting, say, tank compression for hazardous chemicals, one can’t afford a dropped call.

LTE release 13, expected next year, will extend 4G coverage capabilities—from both distance and penetration perspectives. The next generation of LTE will be able to penetrate into, say, basements to connect with a smart meter, or a few feet underground to a water pump. This dramatically increases the scope of operations for connected devices.

Release 13 will also include multi-hop networking, a boon to extending coverage. Devices will be able to send communications back to another device, which then relays that into the network. Eventually, this device-to-device-to-device capability will have big implications for upcoming applications like vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity for self-driving cars.

Robustness will also mean using additional sources of licensed spectrum than what we have today, to account for the expected greater numbers of device connections that will come with IoT. Also, there will likely be an increased use of unlicensed spectrum for higher-bandwidth types of apps. The network may be too crowded in a specific cell site, so being able to offload some traffic via Wi-Fi or other short-range unlicensed technologies will remain important. This may include license-assisted access, where the LTE mobile network controls the connection, which is actually transmitting in unlicensed spectrum.

AT&T is one carrier that is already planning for this multi-network future. According to Mobeen Khan, associate vice president of industrial IoT solutions at AT&T Mobility Business Solutions, AT&T sees its own value proposition as lying with a set of IoT assets that could be connected via satellite, mesh unlicensed networks, Wi-Fi or cellular.

“We understand that it’s a multi-network world, and we have to play in it,” Khan said. “Expect to see more announcements from us around this in the next three to six months.”

Then there’s latency: Certain applications, like closed-loop industrial control and automatic vehicle caravanning—require near-zero delays. Here, too, standards are addressing this.

“The LTE ultra-low-latency specification (LTE-ULL) can actually bring that parameter down to 1 millisecond to make those apps possible,” Lucero said. “This represents a much more aggressive reduction in end-to-end latency than we’ve ever seen.”

In terms of scale, many more devices are expected to be put on mobile networks with IoT—as many as 34 billion by 2020, according to BI Intelligence. That makes traffic-shaping and the ability to separate types of traffic (low-bandwidth, latency-tolerant, etc.) via the service delivery infrastructure very important to the mobile operator business case.

LTE release 11 has enabled the ability to restrict access for delay-insensitive devices. Narrowband IoT in release 13 will also increase the scale of nodes per cell site—to support greater than 500,000 devices—connecting in via same infrastructure as the rest of the fleet of devices out in the field.

Closely related this is the need to increase battery life. For environments where sensors need to send Infrequent, low amounts of data—a very common profile for sensor-based industrial applications—longer battery life (think five to 10+ years) helps to improve business cases where providers can’t send truck rolls out on a frequent basis.

Lucero noted that the next-gen LTE specs are expected to include a power-save mode to allow these types of devices to operate more efficiently. “The idea with narrowband IoT is to increase that extended sleep mode, where the application supports that,” he said. “The devices intersect with the mobile infrastructure here.”

The Need for Management

IoT will not only necessitate changes in the physical architecture. For wireless carriers and other service providers, all of the billions more connected sensors and devices created by the IoT should translate into a demand for more bandwidth—and accompanying optimization efforts.

“There is a journal from 1968 that lays out this cycle,” explained Stephen Mellor, CTO at the Industrial Internet Consortium. “As computer processes got faster, it meant that memory and access to memory couldn’t keep up—and that was a problem. So they fixed that, but then the processor was too slow to take advantage of the memory improvements. So they went back and forth on see-sawing improvements for a decade until they reached an equilibrium.”

Similarly, you “can’t send all the data from the edge to galactic headquarters at once and maintain quality control,” he added. “You will have to process some of that at the edge—and galactic HQ will have to get smarter and make better decisions to find ways of analyzing data locally. For industrial IoT, the communications channels have to be reliable to control, say, surgical equipment remotely, or to monitor dangerous industrial chemicals. So I suspect that for the next seven to 10 years we see a cycle of operators selling more bandwidth, optimizing its use, sell more, optimize, sell more, optimize.”

One big additional change comes in the provisioning requirements. The traditional way of managing device onboarding revolves around a human user with a smartphone in his or her hand. But when the requirement is to onboard whole fleets of devices with service management, this needs to be accomplished in a much more automated fashion than how operators approach things today.

Khan noted, “When an IoT customer looks at provisioning devices, they want to be able to manage them across the lifecycle through a single set of platforms and capabilities, like the ability to secure those endpoint devices and the data coming off of them. We have made an investment in these types of platforms today in cellular, but we’ll make that available across different networks in the future.”

IHS’ Lucero added that standards bodies are also working to define how this happens. “oneM2M, made up of seven regional and national telecom standards bodies like TIA and ETSI, is primary vehicle for that,” he explained. “There are efforts underway to define a common service layer, a taxonomy to look at how devices should connect to the network and be managed, via standard interface.”

He added that ETSI also released its Smart M2M specification, which is an open-source version with software and middleware implementations; and then there’s Fi-ware, a smart-city oriented platform. “At some point these efforts will start to converge,” Lucero said.

The upshot is this: The IoT market is expected to represent a significant new revenue opportunity—driving significant new requirements.

MarketsandMarkets expects global spending on M2M and IoT technologies to reach nearly $250 Billion by 2020, driven by a host of vertical market applications including but not limited to connected car services, remote asset tracking, healthcare monitoring, smart metering, digital signage, home automation and intelligent buildings. The IoT in the energy market alone is expected to grow from $7.59 billion in 2015 to $22.34 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 24.1%.

It’s an opportunity that mobile operators can participate in if they can address the transformation challenges that lie ahead for them.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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