cluding the Array of Things project in
Chicago.
Both testbeds and living labs21 paved
the way for Io T large-scale pilots in Europe, a €100M R&I program that commenced in 2017.12 Examples of such
projects include SynchroniCity (eight
smart-city pilots13), MONICA (Io T technologies to manage sound and security
at large, open-air cultural and sporting events14), and IoF2020 (Internet of
Food and Farm 2020 with 70 partners
from 16 European countries15); many
of these projects are associated with,
and continue to use, the FIWARE infrastructures.
Underpinning
Communications Technologies
The communications substrate in an
IoT/CPS architecture plays a crucial
role, and low-power wireless connec-
tivity is fundamental to balancing con-
nectivity performance with low-power
system capabilities and lifetimes. Free-
dom from power and data cables pro-
vides mobility and autonomy of devices
that are readily deployed and relocated,
can improve performance, and follow
the users and objects they are attached
to, or even move of their own volition,
as with robots and drones. In recent de-
cades, wireless communications was
dominated by Wi-Fi and cellular com-
munications that were ubiquitous yet
energy-hungry; low-power alternatives
had to emerge, as embodied by ZigBee
in 2004. Today, the wireless communi-
cation landscape is significantly more
fluid, with several technologies (both
competing and complementary) offer-
ing disruptive opportunities unthink-
able only a few years ago. Interestingly,
several of these trends are the result of
achievements by European researchers
and companies, as we highlight here.
A prominent example is a new class
of communications mechanisms described as “low-power wide-area networks” (LPWANs) that recently revealed
trade-offs in the amount of power they
require from the device, geographic
coverage or distances they send data,
and data rates. Until a few years ago,
long-range communication was a privilege of cellular telephone communication, where devices were fitted with SIM
cards and communicated typically over
2G GPRS networks. This did not match
with the low-power nature of CPS/Io T
devices and meant they were required
to be plugged into the mains, limiting
where they could be placed or receive
frequent battery changes, and many
stakeholders were reluctant to rely solely on proprietary networks and devices
owned by operators.
SigFox16 based in France was in
2009 the first to use ultra-narrowband
modulation to enable longer-distance
communications while remaining low
power. Since the first deployments that
covered the entire country of France,
SigFox showed its technology can pro-
vide coverage like cellphone commu-
nications but without the need for a
SIM card and at significantly less cost
in terms of money and energy. But
SigFox is still a telco operator, having to
manage access to its own network and
based on proprietary technology. In
contrast, LoRa,
17 which was developed
by Cycleo of Grenoble, France, and ac-
quired by Semtech in 2012, used radio
technology based on chirp spread spec-
trum modulation to effect low-power
wide-area transmission. The LoRa Al-
liance then defined a public suite of
protocol specifications (LoRaWAN)
that allows a telco operator to deploy its
own networks but also enables deploy-
ment and operation of privately owned
networks operating side-by-side. Both
SigFox and LoRa have their main center
of gravity in Europe; for instance, of the
5,000+ gateways deployed today, 3,000+
are in Europe. This is also reflected in
the surge of competing, industry-driven
approaches, among which, arguably
the most prominent, is Huawei’s NB-
Io T. Indeed, today’s version of NB-Io T,
which is being specified by the 3GPP, an
international body of telcos, originated
in early work by NEUL, a company from
Cambridge, U.K., that developed the
Weightless protocol and was bought
out in 2014 by Huawei. LPWA technolo-
gies are not being rolled out worldwide.
Where LPWA supports slow data
over great distances, ultra-wideband
(UWB) communications permits higher data volumes and speeds over short
distances. Originally used for military
applications, UWB became unlicensed
in 2002, but a new wave of interest
has followed a small Irish company
called Deca Wave19 when it released the
