5G technology still being nowadays a great unknown, we have heard a lot about the improvements in bandwidth and greater connection capacity, which allows increasing the number of devices connected at the same time, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of a wide variety of advantages offered by this new technology. Some of them are particularly interesting for IoT and digitalization purposes such as the diversity of environments that can be covered with just one infrastructure.
This technology provides unprecedented flexibility to meet the needs of all use cases in any vertical, resulting in improvements in cost, energy consumption, and signal coverage. To better understand these benefits, let’s analyze them according to three distinct service areas that optimize their functionality to specifically meet the needs of each market segment.
These service areas include improved mobile broadband, enhanced mobile broadband, and massive machine-type communications.
The three 5G service areas:
eMMB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband): It arranges broadband access over a wide coverage area, serving crowded locations, commercial or office areas, and also high-speed public transportation systems.
URLLC (Ultra-High Reliability & Low Latency) supports a wide range of advanced services for latency-sensitive connected devices to enable applications across a wide range of applications.
mMTC (Massive Machine-Type Communications): Is the most optimized service area for the needs of the Internet of Things. It enables the communication of large numbers of devices at a low cost and with minimal energy consumption. The goal of mMTC is to support a huge number of devices and applications, such as sensors, actuators, and other devices that are part of the IoT ecosystem. The characteristics of mMTC include low cost, low power, and low complexity, which makes it well-suited for use in a wide range of IoT applications such as smart cities, transportation, and industrial automation.
The specification for mMTC has some unique characteristics that aim to ensure data is transmitted quickly and efficiently even in the most challenging environments, such as:
- Requirements for the creation of device networks with battery life of up to 10 years.
- Coverage penetration of 164dB with a capacity of 160 bits per second.
- Coverage density to support up to one million connected devices per square kilometer.
- Communication latencies of less than 10 seconds for 20 bytes of data.
- Very cheap hardware as a crucial element for massive scaling.
The mMTC would rely on two network standards available from few years ago although they have so far not been as significant as might have been expected in their origins: NB-IoT (Narrowband-IoT) and LTE-M, which are 3GPP specifications specific for IoT in order to achieve this massive scalability.
The future of Thinger.io in 5G
Since its origins, Thinger.io was created to allow the creation of solutions with scalability criteria at the level of 5G technologies. We developed our entire infrastructure, architecture, and code (using C++ language) with this purpose. Thanks to this vision, we understood in 2019 that 5G and Thinger.io had to go hand in hand, and since then, we have worked on integrating these technologies and functionalities that allow taking full advantage of them in a simple way.
If you want to know more about the advantages that Thinger.io can bring to your projects with 5G technology, or you have an idea that you want to develop with IoT, do not hesitate to contact us by clicking at the bottom below.
