Wirepas - The Future of IoT Networking
Wirepas focuses on the wireless massive internet-of-things (IoT) connectivity, and the technology connects today around 10 million devices in many applications, including smart metering, smart building, smart tracking and smart manufacturing. Wirepas is the creator of the recently standardised DECT NR+ that has received the 5G stamp from the ITU consortium. This is the first non-cellular 5G technology that does not require an operator to be deployed. Today, Wirepas has more than 200 licensees, including shipping giant Maersk, telecommunications operator Orange and the Fagerhult Lighting Group, and its strong licencing partner ecosystem continues to grow.
Wirepas Mesh Overview
The stack is delivered as a binary that is programmed to off-the-shelf radio devices, and supports either 2.4GHz, sub-GHz or 1.9GHz bands. Any device with the Wirepas Mesh can join the network – establish upstream, downstream or node-to-node communication – and extend the coverage by acting as a router for other nodes.
Figure 1: Overview of the Wirepas Mesh network
Wirepas Mesh is decentralised, which means that all networking decisions are taken by the nodes themselves. There is no need for specific routers, network controllers or network tables, which enables the Wirepas Mesh to reach unprecedented scale and reliability.
Wirepas supports very low latency networks for metering and control applications, but it can also operate in low energy mode for large scale, low power deployment. The system supports multiple gateways for redundancy and load balancing, with no single point of failure. The data in a Wirepas network is sent to a central message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) broker, receives, filters, and distributes messages to appropriate clients, ensuring efficient and reliable communication for application usage. Wirepas partners provide a wide range of sensors, tags, and gateway products as well as software tools and platforms that connect to this MQTT platform, see Figure 1.
In addition to the mesh itself, Wirepas provides a complete sensor-to-node connectivity suite. It includes device management services, such as positioning, provisioning, remote update, security, network monitoring. All of these services integrate together in the customer’s backend architecture, which Wirepas does not host.
Why yet another connectivity standard?
A lot of the promise to connect building, campuses or cities wirelessly has not materialised yet. One of the reasons is the lack of global long-range connectivity that can be deployed seamlessly while meeting the performance and reliability requirements for those difficult environments.
To put that into context, in Europe the long-range connectivity that is usually deployed in sub-GHz. But the strict regulation of the sub-GHz band has made the radio almost unusable in the majority of smart city and smart building use cases - either the range is too short, or the performance too poor.
In electricity metering, the next wave of equipment is in very densely populated cities like India or Indonesia, or large cities in North America. This brings huge challenges in terms of density, coverage, reliability and quality or service. Very often the quality of the cellular networks in these places is not sufficient in providing a good enough coverage. Today, there is no connectivity standard that can properly address these challenges globally for smart metering.
Another example is smart buildings; the lack of reliable radio coverage throughout the building makes it difficult to connect emergency light, smoke detector and fire alarm systems on a large scale. To get around this issue, equipment manufacturers have either chosen to connect through wires or use a wide variety of different wireless connectivity solutions, which makes it very complex to deploy. There are still many devices within building without connectivity, which creates issues with maintenance and life cycle management of those devices. This is why the new Wirepas 1.9GHz 5G mesh standard, called DECT NR+, is a real breakthrough.
Introducing DECT NR+
5G is defined by the International Telecommunication Union – Radiocommunication (ITU-R) as a triangle where each corner represents a requirement, see Figure 2. At the top, enhanced mobile broadband, and at the bottom corners massive machine type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable, low-latency communication (URLLC). DECT NR+ is the only connectivity technology capable of supporting both the low-latency requirement and the massive use cases.
Figure 2: The ITU-R defines 5G as a triangle where each corner represents a requirement
Figure 3: The 1.9GHz frequency used by DECT NR+ is available in almost all countries
DECT NR+ is a global standard define by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Technical Committee Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (TC DECT) standard. It is 5G and Mesh, using the DECT 1.9GHz band for massive scale IoT - an unlicenced frequency band – and the first unlicenced 5G technology.
The DECT NR+ standard is dimensioned to connect every IoT device on the planet, providing up to 3km range per hop and a line-of-sight range of up to 6km. It also natively supports IPv6 that allows communication to take place over the network and is design or low-power routing. Most importantly, DECT NR+ is making the 1.9GHz spectrum, which is often referred to as the ‘golden frequency,’ freely available for IoT application on a worldwide basis. This frequency gives an available bandwidth on 10 to 20MHz, almost unused and freely available in almost all countries, see Figure 3.
Using DECT NR+ in private networks
Designed for use in private networks, DECT NR+ can be deployed and operated by anyone and used anywhere. It is self-forming, self-maintenance, and self-healing, and can co-exist with other networks sharing the same spectrum. In this unlicenced band, this is the first time that there is an arbitration between multiple co-existing networks. Unlike 2.4GHz, for example, where there is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread and Zigbee, which can collide and interfere with each other disturbing the quality of the reception.
DECT NR+ supports Mesh, where each device extends the range of increases the communication reliability. It also supports point-to-point for control applications or provisioning and star topology.
In the mMTC requirement, the term ‘massive’ means that the connectivity needs to be able to comply and scale to millions of devices per square kilometre with overlapping networks and robust spectrum policies. It must also be self-forming, provide self-maintenance and self-healing. This requirement is important for applications such as smart energy applications like smart metering, smart city applications like smart street lighting, and smart agriculture like farming. In the URLLC requirement, applies to 1ms latency between nodes for use cases like building automation, smart factories and, even, audio and data devices.
Wirepas technology use cases
Smart metering
In a densely populated residential area in Mumbai, where a million people live in a neighbourhood of around one square kilometre, the requirement for DECT NR+ to scale to millions of smart meters is a very realistic use case. Also, thinking about radio technology, it is very important to understand the ‘real’ coverage. For a given cellular deployment in an area, there can always be some obstacles for the base station where the radio is not well received or there is a network coverage dead zone, see Figure 4. In these areas, the smart meters will not be able to connect. However, with the Wirepas FR Mesh, any smart meter can connect to any other meter within its network coverage. Mesh, therefore, is the only technology able to connect over 99.9% of the meters in a reliable manner.
Smart building metering rooms
Metering rooms in smart buildings can house several hundreds of meters. An additional challenge is that they are usually located in the basement of the building. If a cellular technology is used for connectivity, each meter would need an external antenna and cable outside of the metering room to connect to the cellular base station. With Wirepas RF Mesh, the meters create a mesh network in the metering room and only one meter needs to find a way out of the room via a gateway for all of them to be connected to the data concentrator unit (DCU).
Figure 4: Wirepas 5G Mesh can connect up to 99.99% of smart meters even where 5G coverage is unavailable
Emergency lighting
Emergency lighting is required in any type of building including stadia. In Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, more than 1000 sites have been deployed using Wirepas based emergency lighting. Each instalment needs just an RF Gateway connected to the mains and no extra infrastructure is required. All of the emergency lights are interconnected in a large mesh network. In Quodos Bank, in Sydney, Australia, for example, 2500 emergency lights are now connected seamlessly via Wirepas – the system received building compliance in record time.
DECT NR+ is particularly good for emergency lighting because it is easy to install and commission with automatic devices pairing. There is also no limit to scale, enabling a single emergency network for the complete building. Maintenance can be optimised and, with over the air updates on all devices, the system is future-proofed. As the are no sub-networks or clusters, the system has high availability and reliability in any environment. Finally, because the DECT NR+ mesh network is highly energy efficient, low power battery-operated sensors can be attached to the emergency lighting to augment the visibility of the building.
How and where Avnet Silica fits in
Avnet Silica is a centre of expertise when it comes to Matter and an aggregator of all services and tools provided by its suppliers, including Panasonic, Miromico, and Nordic Semiconductor. As a strategic partner with Wirepas, Avnet Silica can help engineers navigate the Wirepas supplier offerings and ecosystems, enabling them to develop innovative smart solutions. With a focus on services like confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, the company supports engineers working on a Wirepas system from design to mass production, up to product life-cycle management.
