THE INGENU BLOG

October 23, 2015

Dealing with Interference, Part 2 of 2

In our last post we started by comparing you and a friend chatting in a café while a very loud talking lady was interfering with your conversation.

rpma interference

How embarrassing would it be to tell your friend something three times and have them never even acknowledge that they heard you…ever. In the wireless world, that’s called message acknowledgement.

Without capacity, message acknowledgement isn’t possible for some LPWA providers because it’s just too costly to support in terms of network capacity. This leaves users of those technologies susceptible to failed messages. Not so with RPMA, we have message acknowledgement as well as intelligent retransmission schemes for failed packets so that the entire message doesn’t need to be resent. RPMA keeps the conversation normal and efficient, without wasted repeats, or missed sentences.

But wait, there’s more! Now imagine you and your friend can magically understand each other even with Loud Voice lady while both of you are whispering. RPMA can do that. We can detect signals that are weaker than interfering signals that share the exact same channel. Move a channel or two over from ours and the interfering signals can be way more powerful than ours and we can still pick it out nice and clean. It’s like a wireless superpower. Because of the nature of direct-sequence spread spectrum, and our industry leading receiver sensitivity (-142 dBm) we can find signals hidden deep in the noise.

Unfortunately, our narrowband brothers don’t have the same luxuries with interference. Their messages are easily destroyed by even the shortest bursts of broadband transmissions on the same frequency. RPMA is extremely robust to interference by virtue of our MAC’s ability to handle a 50% packet error rate. That means half the packets can be lost and the message still gets through. An RPMA message is like the Zombie that no matter how shot up it gets, it just keeps on moving. Except RPMA is nicer, and doesn’t want to eat brains.

You know that friend who is always cool with last minute changes in evening plans? That’s RPMA. RPMA transmissions adapt to match the available channel quality.

Our modules have transmit power control and our MAC continually adjusts the spreading factor to use the most robust waveform possible. Finally, we have 40 channels to work with in the US because of our available 80 MHz of bandwidth so we have a lot of breathing room. RPMA’s sophisticated MAC, wealth of capacity, and intelligent use of the spectrum makes it incredibly robust to interference. This robustness has been confirmed for years in actual commercial deployments. For years RPMA has supported extremely demanding industries who need reliable communication with their devices.

Put RPMA’s robust connectivity to work for you, contact us at info@ingenu.com or read more about how we deal with interference by downloading our white paper, How RPMA Handles Interference.

October 22, 2015

The Three Parts of the IoT

October 22, 2015

Dealing with Interference Part 1 of 2

You’re sitting with a friend at a café chatting about the latest viral YouTube video, when the lady at the table next to yours begins to talk on her phone.

Only she isn’t talking, she’s yelling. Her voice is far too loud and it’s obnoxious. You can’t even understand your friend anymore. In technical terms, this lady’s voice is causing interference to your conversation. M2M and IoT devices using wireless connectivity deal with the same thing, only Loud Voice lady is some other device hanging around.

In a prior post, we talked about why Ingenu unabashedly loves the 2.4 GHz band. Sometimes we get asked about how busy that band can be and what we do to deal with interference. In this post, we’re going to tell you all about how we handle interference on the 2.4 GHz band when it happens (and it does sometimes).

Interference is an issue any wireless technology will have to deal with, the question is, can it deal with it effectively.

Unlike you and your friend who can just find a table further away, many devices stay right where they are. One of the simplest ways to deal with interference is channel coding, also known as forward error correction (FEC). FEC is kind of like scrambling your message in a fancy and efficient redundant way, and then sending the scrambled message. Sure, some of the packets might get shot out of the air like clay pigeons in a Texan sky, but you are much more likely to get the message through.

The issue some LPWA providers face with FEC (that RPMA doesn’t) is the fact that it requires capacity throughput, that they just don’t have, to encode the data in a redundant way. In other words, dealing with interference is partly a function of your technology’s throughput. RPMA’s throughput is >40,000 bps uplink, and >20,000 bps downlink (FCC). Cellular providers don’t have this issue of course being consumer focused. LPWA providers however, struggle to provide this kind of interference protection with only 1-5% of RPMA’s uplink capacity and 0.02% of RPMA’s downlink capacity. This means RPMA has plenty of room to provide extremely robust transmissions and many other capabilities such as enterprise grade security and firmware downloads. Take that Loud Voice lady!

A naïve approach to protecting against interference like that is simply repeating the message a set number of times, hoping the message makes it through. That’s like you sitting there, blindly repeating what you said from start to finish several times, even if your friend got it the first time, or still repeating the whole thing even if they heard the first half but not the second half. Not only would you have a bewildered buddy, but you would also have wasted everyone’s time and energy. Waste not want not, right? But there’s more to this story.

Continue learning how RPMA intelligently handles interference, by reading our followup blog post, Dealing with Interference, Part 2.

October 21, 2015

Why RPMA Unabashedly Loves the 2.4 GHz ISM Band

Ingenu’s RPMA utilizes the 2.4 GHz ISM band. There, we said it. And we love it! The 2.4 GHz band offers many reasons why it is a practical choice for M2M communication if you are savvy enough to use it right.

At first glance some think that the 2.4 GHz band is inferior to the sub GHz band due to propagation. But this is trivially overcome with antenna diversity. In plain English, we put two antennae on our modules rather than one, because we can. The 2.4 GHz band wavelength is shorter than the 900MHz so we are able to place two antennae and still have flexible and practical small form factors. And just like that, propagation issues are overcome.

2.4GHz technology smart city As with many things, government regulations are the largest hurdle for most frequency bands, including the 900 MHz family of bands. However, the 2.4 GHz band has very favorable government regulations in both the US and Europe. For example, in the US, narrowband transmissions are restricted to 400ms (or 0.4 seconds), but this doesn’t affect RPMA as it utilizes direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation. +1 RPMA!

Another advantage of the 2.4 GHz band is the enormous amount of bandwidth available in the 2.4 GHz band. We have 80 MHz of bandwidth in the US. That means in the US we have 40 completely independent channels to choose from. And in Europe we have an enormous amount compared to only 500 kHz for the 900 MHz band.

What’s more is the 2.4 GHz band is truly available worldwide cost-free. It’s as if some worldwide organization back in the mid 20th century decided that the 2.4 GHz band should be available worldwide. Wait, they did! The 900 MHz family has the ‘family’ in its name because in Europe it is actually 868 MHz and in the US it is 915 MHz; so it isn’t actually available worldwide as a single continuous band.

RPMA was designed to utilize the 2.4 GHz band because it is available worldwide, has more bandwidth, is cost free, and has extremely favorable regulatory conditions. In the end, it isn’t just the frequency band that matters; it’s what you can do with it. And what RPMA does is simply genius.

Get a more detailed comparison of the 2.4 GHz band and 900 MHz band by reading our forthcoming white paper, Unlicensed Spectrum: 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz Compared.

October 19, 2015

Link Budget, More Than How Much You Spend on Sausage

rpma link budget

Link budget is one of those magical terms that to most people means pretty much nothing, but if understood, quickly tells us so much.

Link budget isn’t how much you pay for online ads and it isn’t the budget you have per bratwurst link either. As you may have guessed, link budget is an engineering term. Link budget is actually the single most revealing metric for any wireless technology. It measures the signal power available for transmitting messages and is measured in dB (decibels). The higher the link budget the better signals propagate, or fly through the air with reckless abandon.

Link budget can be spent on a combination of coverage area, reliability of coverage, or penetration depth. If you were to take two wireless technologies and know nothing about them except their link budget you would easily know which one can provide more coverage, coverage reliability, and coverage penetration. And all three of those things are great for your M2M and IoT connected devices.

RPMA’s link budget, at 172 dB (FCC) in actual commercial deployments, is the highest among all IoT wireless options (Cellular: 164-167 dB; LPWA: 149-157 dB). RPMA also has the leading link budget in Europe with 168 dB (Cellular: 155-158 dB; LPWA: ~161 dB). Some may wonder why there is a difference between the FCC and Europe, and it’s not because Europe has syrupy air getting in the way of wireless signals. It all comes down to government regulations (darn those politicians!). Different radio frequency bands have different regulations governing how much power can be used to send and receive signals, among other things. The less power you are allowed to use means the less link budget you’ll get.

Link budget is magical in another way: a unit increase in link budget (say 1 dB) leads to an exponential increase in coverage. So to have one more dB than cellular means we get many multiples increase in coverage, not just a single unit increase in coverage. Link budget is the end result of combining receiver sensitivity, transmission power, antenna gain, legal restrictions in various regions, the natural propagation of the band chosen and ways to enhance each. RPMA’s link budget gets its largest boost from its industry leading receiver sensitivity at -142 dBm. Receiver sensitivity indicates how weak an incoming signal can be and still be obtained by the receiver. It’s like RPMA has super sensitive ears that are able to hear even a panting snail trying to cross a busy sidewalk.

For a quick and revealing way to compare wireless technologies look at link budget as it exists in actual real world commercial deployments (because it’s easy to say you have a much higher link budget before you actually deploy in real world conditions). So, that’s your primer on link budget, spend it well.

To learn how RPMA has such incredible link budget, download our white paper, How RPMA Works, or contact us at info@ingenu.com.

September 29, 2015

Jarich on Mobile World Congress 2016: Do you know what to expect?

Fierce Wireless – September 29, 2015 – I’ve been thinking a lot about Mobile World Congress 2016 lately. In part, I’m just mentally preparing for a ski trip in Gstaad the week prior, the first time I’ve been skiing in forever (note: If you see me hobbling around La Fira in a cast, don’t ask). But there are also a handful of other reasons. CTIA’s Super Mobility Week just finished up earlier this month; while not approaching the stature of Mobile World Congress (MWC), it’s still one of the largest mobile-focused trade shows, providing insights into what we might see in Barcelona. Just prior to Super Mobility Week, we completed our first Mobile World Congress planning session with a customer. And since that was a cue to book my flight home from MWC, I soon realized that all the window seats are taken on any flight I’m likely to take. First world problems — I know. Read More>>

September 29, 2015

IoT Battery Life

It may not be the lead-off topic you’re looking for as you make that big impression on your next date, but what IoT battery life lacks in flash, it makes up for in utility and consequence. Device power consumption warrants tremendous consideration when designing and deploying IoT/M2M solutions. This is most salient to consumers when they need to make an important phone call, only to have their battery die in mid-sentence. This exact scenario could happen to devices where battery life wasn’t properly considered or understood.

IoT Battery Life For many years it has been more than acceptable to live within the limitations of consumer-grade battery life that offers comparable longevity to last night’s dinner. We are trained to fit the routine of plugging a cell phone into the wall on a daily basis. Likewise, we’ve been trained to think that as we develop M2M and IoT solutions that we must live within the same boundaries that restrict us as humans (i.e. cell phones, tablets, laptops). Those boundaries include depth and range of coverage, cost, and, of course, power consumption. The truth is that the wireless technologies that enrich our lives on one hand as humans are being used on the other hand as a retrofit to support a immense convoy of several billion machines that require an entirely different set of priorities and characteristics. Here are just a few considerations:

Frequency: Think for a minute about how many times in a day that you check your phone – you may have already checked it once or twice since you began reading this post. We consume data in a way that is frequent, requires large data packets, and is expected to be instant. During the intervals of quiet (when no data is being transmitted) these devices can go into a sort of hibernation that allows for immense power savings.
Packet size: The Internet of Things, by contrast, is made up of all kinds of devices, sensors and machines that in most cases are sending significantly smaller pieces of data with far less frequency. Machines don’t have to be cordial and listen to your Aunt Susan’s rant about the local politicians, or download all of the imagery that is sent along with your other messages – it cuts directly to the point, as succinctly as possible.
Data transmission protocols: These can vary greatly from human/consumer-based protocols. From UDP to TCP to a RESTful-based approach, machine communication protocols can greatly impact the power requirements of a device.

This is really just the beginning of the variables that impact the design and deployment of IoT solutions, related to power consumption. As such, devices with a minimum of 10-year battery life will quickly become the standard for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. Download our white paper on battery life to find out what other secrets you can unlock to harness the battery power of IoT devices.

September 28, 2015

IoT-Specific Networks

Industrial Equipment News – September 28, 2015 – Hey! Will All this IoT Stuff Mess Up Our LTE? Probably not, actually.

IoT devices will typically be low- to no-maintenance and work for years from battery power for a long time. Industrial applications will often mean that the device will be placed and, essentially, operate in isolation in the far reaches of factories or in the field. So, Wi-Fi won’t always be appropriate. Those devices will often be reaching out to report their data via cellular connections. Here’s the trick. Machina Research predicts that nearly 1.5 million (Yes. Million.) of these devices will be up-and-running within only five years. Will they be connecting via existing LTE networks? Sometimes, yes, though now the push is to create built-from-scratch LPWA (Low-Power-Wide Area cellular) networks. While the devices themselves only transmit small amounts of data, millions of ‘em could mean straining existing LTE networks (and clogging bandwidth pipes for the rest of us). Read More>>

September 28, 2015

On-Ramp Becomes Ingenu, Announces Public Build-Out

IoT Journal – Sep 28, 2015 – On-Ramp Wireless, a San Diego-based provider of long-range, low-power communication technology for machine-to-machine (M2M) systems, has changed its name to Ingenu as part of a rebranding process that also includes launching a network of access points across the United States. The company’s Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA) technology is so named because it enables thousands of devices to share a single radio channel. It was purpose-built for transmitting data over a wide area while consuming low power. Read More>>

September 22, 2015

New LTE standard for Internet of Things gets push from 3GPP

Fierce Wireless – September 22, 2015 – The 3GPP took a big step forward last week in defining a new LTE standard designed for the low-power and low-bandwidth nature of the Internet of Things.

At a meeting in Phoenix the 3GPP’s radio access network working group agreed to standardize Narrowband-IoT, or NB-IoT. “The new technology will provide improved indoor coverage, support of massive number of low throughput devices, low delay sensitivity, ultra-low device cost, low device power consumption and optimized network architecture,” 3GPP said in a blog post. Read More>>

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