Leveraging Cellular IoT Technologies
In this chapter, we will provide an overview of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) cellular IoT technologies with 5G, covered in Chapter 5, Validating 5G with IoT. There are specific LPWA LTE technologies called LTE Category M (which we will refer to as LTE-M) and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), which are primarily used in low-power enterprise cellular IoT solutions. Both of these LTE LPWA technologies will be covered in this chapter. As we will describe, there are unique features of LTE-M and NB-IoT that have helped drive the global cellular IoT device market to reach 2 billion in 1H21 (IoT Analytics, 2021) with the number of cellular IoT connections expected to reach 3.5 billion in 2023 (Ericsson 2022). While in 2020, unlicensed LPWA technologies (such as LoRa) led licensed LTE LPWA connections with a 53% market share, one year later, LTE LPWA connections led with a 54% share (IoT Analytics, 2021).
In this chapter, we will provide a technical overview of...