Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS

mioty® Class B

© Fraunhofer / Piotr Banczerowski

New features thanks to mioty® extension

The mioty® wireless standard is expanding its spectrum with new Class B functions, which enable a wide range of applications in the smart building and smart home sectors

mioty®


Designed for massive IoT applications in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or in the smart city sector, mioty ® wireless transmission technology reliably and robustly transmits data from hundreds of thousands of sensors, even over long distances. This is possible thanks to our patented telegram-splitting method. Standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), mioty® is a hardware-agnostic software solution that is particularly useful in low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs).

As a result, the technology is specially designed for large-scale industrial and commercial IoT applications that require scalability in addition to high data availability and quality. Through the technological extension of mioty® with Class B, a whole host of additional possibilities are now available in the smart city, Industrial IOT (IIOT) and building management sectors. The usual measurement tasks, such as temperature measurement, can now be supplemented by control functions, such as heating or air conditioning. 

 

 

 

 

Device Classes

 
The features of the mioty ® technology are grouped into three classes: Z, A and B, each with special properties and functions.
As the foundation of mioty ® technologies, Class Z enables primarily conventional measurement tasks – in other words, monitoring. Battery-powered devices that operate according to Class Z have extremely low energy consumption, long ranges, high scalability and low susceptibility to interference. Class Z is unidirectional, meaning it transmits data exclusively from battery-powered sensors to the base station.
Building on Class Z, Class A provides additional configuration benefits by allowing messages to be sent downlink from the base station to an endpoint. Class A devices are able to transmit information unidirectionally via uplink to a base station and can also be configured via downlink (bidirectionality). Here, too, battery-powered sensors work with the existing advantages of Class Z.  

mioty® Device Classes

What’s new

Finally, the most recent class, Class B, adds control functions to the spectrum. This is made possible by broadcast features, namely the control of all actuators by downlink or by multicast in a group of actuators. As a result, users can take advantage of new applications in building management, such as being able to close and open windows or to control temperature via heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC).

Class B builds on its two predecessors with the use of battery-powered wireless actuators.


How does Class B work?
Reliable, scalable and cost-effective control:

Class B now combines the advantages of conventional, wireless remote maintenance and control systems with the high energy efficiency, long range, and the resulting low installation and maintenance costs and robustness of mioty® – even in harsh environmental conditions.

Class B supports expanded control functions

Basic principles

The way Class B works is based mainly on telegram splitting; it retains the Class Z uplink functionality. Class B also features a broadcast mode, in which the base station transmits a periodic signal, or beacon, that can be received by all endpoints supported by Class B.

 

The beacon indicates if and when a message has been sent to one or more endpoints in the time until the next beacon. Message transmission takes place in defined time slots within the data region. An endpoint that is synchronized to the beacon activates reception only in the time slots when a message is transmitted for it; otherwise, it remains in low-power sleep mode until the next beacon signal.

Ideally, all defined time slots can be used for sending downlinks without overlap or collision. In implementation, however, the endpoint may lose synchronization with the base station beacon. This occurs either due to interference from other radio signals in the band, especially in the unlicensed spectrum, or because the base station is out of range, for example due to movement of the endpoint. Consequently, the endpoint must resynchronize with the base station. Additional broadcasting activities for repeated synchronization of the base station and endpoints, as well as retransmission of beacon and coordination information, are required for this. The further demand on radio resources usually means a degradation of the actual synchronous transmission, which the mioty® telegram-splitting method minimizes. The pauses between the radio bursts of a transmission allow a base station to receive partial packets from another endpoint between transmissions. Even if the base station cannot receive all radio bursts of a transmission, the data can still be reconstructed using channel coding. The probability of complete collisions between uplink and downlink radio bursts is very low.

 

With our R&D expertise, we support you as you integrate this technology and adapt it to your individual requirements.

 

Are you interested? Then please get in touch!