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power, says Imagination.
Higher up the application stack there
are other consortia looking to build low
power smart energy networks for IoT.
Weightless is an open standard that
operates in a range of bands including
the unlicensed sub GHz band to provide
a low power implementation. With
silicon designed by Neul (Acquired
by Huawei) in Cambridge, Weightless
is now testing out IoT applications in
Milton Keynes.
The Open Interconnect Consortium is
another competing group that is also
aiming to provide a low power protocol
for IoT starting with the home. This
group includes Atmel, Cisco, Dell, Intel
and its Wind River subsidiary, as well
as Samsung who is also in the Thread
Group.
The OIC is aiming to create a common
communications framework based
on industry standard technologies to
connect and manage IoT devices. The
open source layer is intended to be
Figure 2: Thread network architecture (Courtesy of the Thread
Group)
Figure 3: Enigma Whisper Bluetooth Smart and low power Wi-Fi (Courtesy of Imagination
Technologies)
it for different products for different
standards. For example, a dedicated
802.11ah implementation will be half
the size and power consumption of a
full 802.11n WiFi design, and can still
be used alongside a Bluetooth block,
for example. Taking this configurable
route is the way to achieve lower
IoT
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