Who will be wireless king in the future IoT era?

The Internet of things (IoT), which was considered to be the engine of the future global electronics industry, is now facing a bottleneck.

At present, IoT has a wide range of applications, and then a more accurate description is: massive of fragmented application scenarios.

And this is the main reason for the current bottleneck in IoT development roadmap.

Consistent with this characteristic, the wireless technology that transmitting the physical world (sensors) information, evolving at the same time, both old and new technologies are trying to devour the market share and dominate the future of IoT applications.

From close-range, Bluetooth, to mid distance ZigBee, WiFi, and more extensive cellular communications 5G, and different networking architectures, such as NB-IoT, Mesh, LoRa and so on. There are different vendors to provide technologies and chips.

So, which or what kinds of wireless technologies will play a leading role in future IoT applications?

I will analyze the current status of the mainstream wireless technologies, the possible future development path, and finally give my judgment and suggestion.

1. 802.11ac: WiFi compromises with IoT?

WiFi is now the most widely used wireless technology for families and consumers, as well as the most popular and familiar among consumers. However, the problems of power consumption, frequency band communication, interference and security make the application of WiFi in the Internet of Things can’t copy the popularity in the consumer products.

Now, the new 802.11ac has been optimized to fit the embedded Internet of Things applications.

Figure: ABI Research forecasts shipment for various WiFi specifications (March 2017)

First of all, what optimizations did 802.11ac do?

Technically, 802.11ac works in 5GHz band, with more frequency bands and less interference, with 80 MHz bandwidth, 256 QAM and faster connection speed. Through dynamic channel management, it can effectively improve the network throughput rate and capacity and use standardized beam forming to achieve better performance and wider coverage.

To be continue…