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Imagine you are an engineer looking at incorporating Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity features into your next product. It could be anything: a car, a doorbell, a shipping container, a smartphone, industrial equipment. How do you ensure that your product will be able to connect? Keeping up with mobile communications technology can be difficult. We are on 4G, but on the horizon is 5G and using it will underpin the success of many IoT applications, says Casper Klop, marketing manager for National Instruments in Northern Europe.
According to Klop, one of the most important factors is that engineers need to start prototyping both 5G infrastructure and commercial products that use 5G earlier, to reduce the time spent testing and improving designs and software. “The 2020 goal for 5G – and some people even talk about 2018 – is pretty quick. The time pressure on developing 5G is incredibly high,” he says. “Engineers are not able to create prototypes from scratch, so they are increasingly using commercial off-the-shelf products that have the flexibility to incorporate a prototype.”
The focus is on developing the infrastructure backbone of 5G first. This involves working out expectations, defining standards and conducting research on how to meet those standards. A key challenge then is to meet the requirements about what people need from 5G. The obvious answer is more bandwidth, but the requirements also include improvements in other areas, such as capacity and a lower energy footprint. Most crucially, for many new IoT applications, 5G needs to be ultra-reliable and low-latency. One such application, says Klop, is remote robotic surgery that involves haptic feedback.
“Ultra-reliable and low-latency connections are a defining factor for 5G. We are defining the capabilities of what we are researching and are going to incorporate that into standards,” he says.
Research areas include MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output), which allows more connections over a network. Another is advanced wireless networks, where engineers are looking at using smaller cells. This would be advantageous in public places, such as a sports stadium, where thousands of connections might occur at the same time. “We are defining more and more what the capabilities of 5G are and we have some key research initiatives in the area. There is a lot of work to be done,” he says.
Another trend for IoT is coping with the amount of data produced by sensors and devices, particularly in the industrial setting. “Companies are already collecting a lot of data and only analysing around 5% of it,” says Klop. You could be ignoring data that is valuable – some companies aren’t equipped to deal with it.
One solution is that sensors are getting smarter, using techniques such as signal conditioning and pushing out configurations to sensors remotely. National Instruments is offering data management tools to help accomplish this, says Klop.
“We want to move data into enterprise management solutions, so everyone has access to it and can use it. The challenge is working with IT. Engineers need to learn how to work with IT and reduce the amount of data to transfer or put in the cloud. We are bringing analysis closer to the sensor to help with this,” he says.