special report By Dr. Shane Rooney, GSMA Licensed spectrum key to success of LPWA networks L ow Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks will play a crucial role in the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting up billions of devices across a diverse range of vertical industry sectors such as utilities, agriculture, manufacturing and transport. They are an emerging, high-growth area of the IoT that complement and extend conventional wide area networks that make use of 2G, 3G and 4G cellular technologies. LPWA networks are designed for low cost applications that have low data rates, long battery lives, long reach and operate in remote and hard to reach locations where existing mobile technologies may not be well suited. This could be anything from industrial asset tracking, safety monitoring, water and gas metering to smart grids, city parking, vending machines and city lighting. The LPWA market has the potential to be huge with Analysys Mason estimating that there will be 5 billion LPWA connections by 2022 with a value of $7.5 billion. The GSMA established the Mobile IoT Initiative in June 2015 with the support of over thirty mobile operators and other industry vendors; and with the specific purpose of aligning the mobile industry behind common and complementary LPWA technologies in licensed spectrum to accelerate the availability of commercial solutions. Due to the diversity of IoT application requirements, a single technology is not capable of addressing every LPWA use case. For this reason we have focused on three complementary technologies: Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT), and two pre-existing evolved technologies, EC-GSM-IoT and LTE MTC Cat-M1. These will cover all LPWA use cases, ensure customer choice and help the market to flourish. They have been ratified and standardised by 3GPP. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) The GSMA also established a separate group called the GSMA NB-IoT Forum to accelerate the wide-spread adoption of 3GPP-based NB-IoT technology. NB-IoT is a standards-based Low Power Wide Area technology developed to enable a wide range of new IoT devices and services. NB-IoT significantly improves the power consumption of user devices, system capacity and spectrum efficiency, especially in deep coverage. Battery life of more than 10 years can be supported for a wide range of use cases. NB-IoT can co-exist with 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile networks and benefits from all the security and privacy mobile network features, such as support for user identity confidentiality, entity authentication, confidentiality, data integrity, and mobile equipment identification. Crucially, the Mobile IoT initiative focuses on solutions in licensed spectrum, which is a more reliable choice, offering a better quality of service than unlicensed. Unlicensed is free and open to anybody to use but has a number of significant drawbacks. For example, it is subject to interference and congestion and cannot be relied upon to deliver a pre-defined quality of service. In some markets, regulatory restrictions can also apply to the use of unlicensed spectrum making it difficult to generate global economies of scale. Conversely, licensed spectrum offers customers a choice without locking them into a particular technology or supplier as their business changes. It is also scalable, secure and its infrastructure provides a Quality of Service (QoS) unlike unlicensed spectrum, which has restrictive data message lengths and availability. Given the limitations of unlicensed spectrum, mobile operators have a clear long-term preference to The LPWA market has the potential to be huge with Analysys Mason estimating that there will be 5 billion LPWA connections by 2022 with a value of $7.5 billion. 32 INTERNET OF THINGS