18
Network Software – Energy Management and Control
18.1 Will the Pot Call the Kettle Back?
In January 1999 we wrote a Technology Topic on Device Access Networks, ‘Will the Pot call the Kettle Back? (1). We suggested that the protocols needed to allow devices to discover one another and then have a meaningful conversation were insufficiently standardised to support widespread market adoption. This was identified as a potential problem for Bluetooth enabled devices.
As with many prognostications we were partly right. Agreeing the Bluetooth procedures for device-to-device discovery and device-to-device communication proved to be a Herculean process and work is still ongoing in this area.
In November 2007 we thought it was time for a sequel – Will the Pot Call the Kettle Back? (2).
The original article focused on device-to-device communications in the home. Eight years later the focus had shifted to corporate, specialist and consumer machine-to-machine communication, the machine-to-machine (M2M) triple-play proposition. In 2007 it was estimated that there were ten microcontrollers for every human on the planet with the microcontroller population growing faster over time – a 60 billion unit target market. On that basis the machine-to-machine market represented a high-value high-growth revenue opportunity.
This was, and is, undoubtedly true but five years on our electricity, gas and water meters are generally still read by people, I buy my train ticket from a man in a ticket office (very helpful chap by the way), check the level of water in our water butt by lifting the lid and looking inside, check the oil level in the car by wiping the dipstick and open the curtains at home by hand. I use a conventional diary because the access times are faster and I use a map in the car because I hate being told what to do.
So the question is, are the big opportunities in the corporate, specialist or consumer domain, what are the market adoption barriers that are holding back genuinely ubiquitous machine-to-machine communication and how can these barriers be overcome and/or have they already been overcome, which must be the assumption behind some of the more bullish market forecasts.
18.2 Corporate M2M
There is a wide choice of technology for machine-to-machine communication; indeed the breadth of choice has proved more of a hindrance than an asset. If faced with too many options people may choose not to choose. For example, an M2M application connecting vending machines to a central hub can be realised using VHF or UHF two-way radio or a GPRS modem. More localised connectivity can be provided using WiFi and/or Bluetooth and/or ZigBee. White-space devices are also being propositioned for M2M applications.1
Machines have some advantages over people. They do not complain, though their owners might. Many corporate M2M applications are static, vending machines being one example. They are also often installed in basements where radio coverage is poor. Thus, the choice of radio technology may be dictated by propagation.
Many of the applications are low-bandwidth exchanges of a few kilobytes or less and may or may not be time critical. If power drain is not an issue, devices can be continuously connected. More often it makes more sense for devices to be polled or to send data at preassigned intervals or on an as-required basis – a ‘running out of chocolate’ message for example. One application that is apparently successful is a rodent trap that sends an SMS message when a visitor arrives. SMS can also be used to send control messages to remote devices.
A number of organisations provide bespoke solutions for corporate end-to-end customers. Examples include Vianet,2 Arkessa3 are an example in the UK as are Arkessa and Aeris.4 Operators such as Orange have also been proactive in developing this market.
18.3 Specialist M2M
Specialist M2M applications are different from corporate M2M in that the application spend would typically be justified on the basis of public safety or security. The most pervasive example presently would be CCTV surveillance and/or speed cameras or traffic-monitoring devices. The bandwidth exchange for a PIR (passive infra red) detector would be a few tens of kilobytes. A picture from a surveillance camera would typically be 40 or 50 kilobytes.
As with corporate M2M these exchanges may be event driven or periodic. Images used as evidence in court need to be digitally water marked and audit trailed to minimise the risk of being challenged. Specialist M2M includes devices that are capable of working in extreme conditions including heat (−30 to +80 degrees), water and dust and capable of withstanding shock or continuous vibration.
Low-cost cellular modems are not always suitable for these applications. There are a number of vendors that service this market, for example KoreTelematics5 in the US and TDC in the UK. There is obvious overlap between corporate and specialist user markets and commonalities in terms of need and requirement.
18.4 Consumer M2M
Consumer M2M applications are different from corporate and specialist M2M in that the application spend is justified on the basis of entertainment and/or personal convenience.
Getting a kettle to tell a teapot that is has reached boiling point might be entertaining but is not necessarily useful, though might be in special circumstances, for example making life easier and safer for home owners with sight disability.
Verizon in the US have a home automation portal called ‘Control Point’ that links WiFi with their LTE network to provide remote management of home security, lighting, heating, air conditioning and ‘connected intelligent furnishings’ (whatever they may be) from a smart phone, useful I suppose for people who own multiple homes and/or go on holiday a lot and/or don't get on with their neighbours.
Similarly, moving higher-bandwidth data around the home when you are in it offers undeniable potential both from a user-experience perspective and in terms of delivering new consumer product differentiation opportunities. Simple examples prevalent today would be the use of shared folders on a lap top and PC across a wireless router.
Several issues, however, need to be considered.
18.5 Device Discovery and Device Coupling in Consumer M2M Applications and the Role of Near-Field Communication
Our January 1999 Technology topic talked about the difficulties of device discovery and device coupling. Essentially, the question revolved around how to manage device discovery and device coupling policy. Eleven years later this problem still remains to be solved.
As you walk around a house, devices come into radio view and become available for service. Just because a device is available to use does not mean that you want to use it and the process of discovery and coupling takes time (bandwidth) and power. This is not a decision process that can be safely left to a machine, unless that machine has an understanding of the user and the context in which the device may or may not be enabled. The answer may be to use near-field communication.
NFC devices are in everyday use as travel cards. The 13-MHz transponder is touched on the turnstile at the tube station or pay button on the bus. Nokia have developed a parallel enthusiasm for NFC in hand-held cellular devices.
This would seem to make complete sense as a means for managing the device-coupling process. If you want two devices to talk or multiple devices to talk, you physically introduce them to one another. NFC has been briefly touched on (excuse the pun) in an earlier chapter, but obligingly the following press release just appeared in my in box and addresses payment applications – the logical extension from travel cards.
Danish Operators Join Forces on Mobile Wallet
By Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Jun 23, 2011 2:40 pm
TDC, Telenor, TeliaSonera and Three are cooperating on the launch of a digital wallet service based on NFC (Near Field Communications) in Denmark, the operators said on Thursday.
The roll-out will start this fall, but it will take a few years before the technology reaches widespread adoption, according to the operators. The number of NFC-compatible phones and take-up among retailers will determine the pace, a spokesman at TDC said.
Consumers will be able to use their mobiles to pay for goods, services and travel, at a discount if digital coupons are available, and also open doors at hotels or borrow a book at the library, according to the operators’ vision of the future.
For users, the operators working together will mean that they can switch from one to the other and still bring their wallet with them, the operators said.
For the project to become a success, the operators will need backing from all parts of the technology and merchant ecosystem, including phone makers, banks, card companies and last but not least retailers. The announcement didn't have any details on such partnerships.
Operators are increasingly getting together to push mobile payments using NFC. The announcement in Denmark follows the creation of similar projects in the U.S. with the Isis network.
The operators are hoping to gain greater control of the payments market by offering a single platform, according to market research company CCS Insight.
So possibly this marks the start of the big breakthrough, at least in the consumer part of the market.
18.6 Bandwidth Considerations
A payment transaction is at most a few kilobytes but some transactions could be significantly more bandwidth intensive.
This is not just an access-bandwidth issue but a storage-bandwidth issue. There is not much point in streaming a high-definition television programme to a device with a few kilobytes of buffer bandwidth and/or limited video and audio playback capability. For example, most of us would understand that there is not much point in coupling the VCR and a kettle unless of course it was a very exceptional kettle. There are also possibly at least four types of exchange that need to be supported, best effort, streamed, interactive and conversational:
Best effort is for non time critical exchanges, opening the curtains perhaps.
Streamed is for moving video from device to device.
Interactive is for gaming and other interactive pursuits (keep an eye on the teapot and the kettle they might starting placing bets against each other).
Conversational is for conversational devices – teddy bears that talk to each other and/or respond to a TV programme – hideous but here.
Within the WiFi 802.11 e QOS standards process these applications have been accommodated with the extended data channel access wireless media extension that supports background and best effort and video and voice bearers simultaneously on a 20-MHz time multiplexed channel aggregated into an eight-level queue at the access point.
This is a world away from the original contention-based medium access control that has been the basis for WiFi systems to date. In practice, it will probably work reasonably well most of the time, which remarkably enough seems to be acceptable to most consumers.
Similarly, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR now supports three simultaneous traffic streams for voice, data and device control. One suggestion is that Bluetooth 3.0 will extend this parallel approach by supporting WiFi at 2.4 and 5 GHz. Bluetooth would then become by default a local area radio access management protocol rather than a specific physical layer standard. Together with ZigBee this would seem to address most of the foreseeable local area machine-to-machine requirements.
18.7 Femtocells as an M2M Hub?
An alternative is to consider the role that femtocells might play in the corporate, specialist and consumer M2M proposition. In corporate applications we have said that machines are sometimes positioned deep within a building. The loss from an outdoor cell into a building interior can be anything between a few dB to more than 40 dB.
In these situations a femtocell or femtocells can be installed to provide coverage. Similarly, specialist machine-to-machine applications may need to be supported underground and femtocells would again provide a coverage option. In both cases the economics of such a solution would probably need to be amortised over a range of uses including voice, broadband data and M2M. The exception may be safety-critical M2M where the application may have sufficient value to cover capital and running costs for the installation.
Operators are generally positive about femtocells because the real-estate cost of hosting a base station is transferred to the building owner or occupier. If the operator provides ADSL broadband as part of the package then the backhaul has been transformed from being a cost to a revenue item. Some infrastructure vendors are less positive – ‘an excuse for a bad network’ being one vendor's view.
The positioning of femtocells as a home hub is also less than clear. The same benefits to the operator apparently apply. The real-estate cost of hosting a base station is transferred to the consumer and if the operator supplies an ADSL line then backhaul becomes a revenue item.
However, in the home as indeed in many office and public spaces, femtocells are competing with WiFi, which although far from perfect does work and still has significant cost-reduction and performance-optimisation potential.
Rather than the single 5-MHz RF channel pair used in a femtocell, WiFi uses 20 MHz or in some cases 40 MHz (two bonded 20-MHz channels) to deliver 54 Mbits/s or 100 Mbits/s. The actual throughput rates are a fraction of this but still faster than a femtocell can manage. Although femtocell throughput rates will increase overtime so will WiFi.
Today, on a femtocell supporting four parallel voice channels the peak data may be enough for corporate or personal e mail but is not enough for broadband machine-to-machine communication in the home.
The range from a femtocell may be better as the allowed transmit power is higher and receive sensitivity is higher due to the frequency duplex. It must, however, be questionable as to how many houses are large enough for this benefit to count.
Thus, although femtocells may have a role to play in machine-to-machine connectivity in some corporate and specialist applications it is harder to see the rationale for home-hub applications. Arguably, all femtocells do is increase the user's energy bill.
And anyway, why use wireless given that most of these appliances are connected to a mains socket. The Home Plug Powerline Alliance6 supports a set of standards for transferring IP packets between devices. This includes entertainment devices and entertainment hubs (back to those smart televisions we talked about in Chapter 9) and smart energy networks.7
18.8 Summary
M2M is a fast growth sector attracting the attention and support of a wide range of vendors and more recently a relatively broad cross section of operators offering bespoke solutions. Traditional VHF and UHF radio modems can still be cost and performance effective in many applications. In order to compete, cellular-based propositions need to be carefully costed, well deployed and well supported and for most applications have access to inexpensive (under utilized) bandwidth.
There are essentially three markets, corporate, specialist and consumer. There is substantial overlap between corporate and specialist applications and crossover opportunities between machine-to-machine and telemetry applications. Consumer machine-to-machine is substantially different. Entertainment applications are inherently more bandwidth hungry, energy management applications less so.
Traditional difficulties associated with device discovery can potentially be resolved by using NFC technologies integrated into cellular phones and hand-held communication devices. This would seem to suggest that consumer M2M could be potentially serviced by low-cost femtocells offering cellular compatibility.
However, the consumer M2M market is aggressively addressed by WiFi products that offer higher data rates than femtocells at lower unit costs. WiFi products still have substantial cost-optimisation and performance-gain potential. For these reasons it is hard to see how femtocells can score in this sector unless substantial subsidies are applied. Device-to-device data rates may be disappointing and dual cellular WiFi access may need to be provisioned, which would be unnecessarily complex and expensive. Outdoor to indoor coverage can also be expected to improve as network densities increase over time. Consumer M2M can be expected to include a wide variety of higher-bandwidth applications for example video sharing and lower-bandwidth exchanges including device to device telemetry and control.
Handset vendors promote the logic of using the cellular phone as a control point for these devices and applications. This begs the question as to whose phone controls the house in multiphone households. We will continue to open curtains by hand rather than by phone and talking teapots will remain as at most a niche product opportunity.
The case for cellular in consumer M2M remains unproven but corporate and specialist applications may provide a more than adequate market opportunity.
1 http://www.neul.com/products.php.