Alan Woolhouse, Weightless Speaking at Tenerife Tech and Biz - Dec 2013

1CONFIDENTIAL Weightless | www.weightless.com

why does the world need another wireless standard?

alan woolhouse

diciembre 2013

la laguna, tenerife


What’s wrong with 3G/LTE? Why low-cost/power is important 10s of billions of connections of very low value

remote sensors must be wireless, must be battery operated

Why cellular cannot deliver the connectivity high cost spectrum

high cost terminal hardware

high cost base station hardware

high cost deployment (vs off-grid)

high cost operation (spectrum amortisation / ARPU)

high power terminals because of sophisticated processing

high bandwidth protocol demands processing power

high power terminals because of network traffic

high power terminals because of data packet overhead

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Smart Cities• City Wide sensor networks – the backbone of the city

• Parking and traffic management – direction to empty spaces

• ‘Smart’ Litter bins – emptied on demand

• Environmental monitoring – traffic flow control to reduce CO2

• Street Light optimization – activated by movement

• Electric Vehicle (EV) re-charging points (EVSE)

• Road condition monitoring – variable speed limits, ice gritting...

• Integrated traffic management – flow and congestion

PLEASE PARK ON L4 498

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Some general trends in cellular

Cost per chip ~ 2x per generation Often a mix of complexity and royalty costs

Power consumption growing per generation Moore’s Law improvement more than offset by added

complexity Bill of materials may grow even faster than 2x

MIMO antennas, multi-core processors, extra bands, etc Becoming more data-centric

2G voice with data added later 3G a mix of both, circuit and packet switched 4G doesn’t fully support voice (being worked on)

Reducing number of networks Consolidation, network sharing, outsourcing to same partner

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IoT barely works on 2G

Requirements ~$2 per chip Battery life up to 10 years Range of 5km+ with indoor penetration

2G ~$5 per chip Battery life up to months with care Range of 3km with indoor penetration

4G ~$50 per chip, might fall over time Battery life of days Range probably less than 2G

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Internet

Network Manager

Base station interface

Air interface

Weightless specification

Synchronisation database

Client information / management system

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Weightless design principles

Designed for machines Very low overhead on small packets Almost no signalling traffic Features like multiparty messages and “alert quashing”

Designed for white space (but will work elsewhere) TDD Smart hopping, nulling and other interference mitigation

Ubiquitous coverage implies a cellular architecture Deep indoor coverage with low transmit power implies spreading to

extend range Entirely software-based core network to lower cost

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Why Weightless?

No existing standard in this space Technically very different from existing technologies Commercially very different from existing value chains No other technology will enable tens of billions of connections

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Overall progress to date

Weightless SIG in place for over a year and published v1.0 in April

2013

Board Members: Accenture, ARM, Vodafone, CSR, Neul

Over 1,350 members and growing fast

White space available in US and nearly complete in UK

Hardware available early 2014

The key step in enabling large-scale trials and deployments

Multiple trial networks

Join now as Observers - it’s free, it’s easy, it’s quick...

Visit weightless.org

Join the Weightless LinkedIn Group

email me: [email protected]

Alan Woolhouse, Weightless Speaking at Tenerife Tech and Biz - Dec 2013

Technology

Transcript of Alan Woolhouse, Weightless Speaking at Tenerife Tech and Biz - Dec 2013