MIOTY Silicon Vendor Agnostic, Scalable LPWAN Standard to Take on LoRaWAN, NB-IoT

[April 6th update: The article was updated to reflect Fraunhofer invented the technology]

There are plenty of LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networks) standards designed for low power, low bitrate and long-range connectivity with the most popular currently being NB-IoT and LoRaWAN. But Texas Instruments has joined other smaller companies (Fraunhofer, Ragsol, STACKFORCE, WIKA…) to form the MIOTY alliance in order to develop and promote a new LPWAN standard operating in the sub-GHz range called MIOTY.

MIOTY

Texas Instruments explains MIOTY was born due to a lack of scalability and robustness (interferences issues) of current LPWAN solutions. But just like other similar low power WAN standards, it aims to support long-range while achieving long battery life, but MIOTY is also supposed to help IoT developers mitigate performance degradation in high-node-count networks.

MIOTY works in the same license-free bands (868 MHz, 915 MHz …) as LoRa radios with no costs involved to use the radio spectrum. The solution offers a star network for low-power end/leaf nodes, as well as a gateway solution for cloud connectivity. Currently, companies have to set up their own private networks, but eventually, there may be third parties offering network solutions.

LoRaWAN only works on chips developed Semtech, while Sigfox also relies on proprietary solutions, but MIOTY physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC), but MIOTY is based on a standard from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), namely TS 103 357 “Short Range Devices; Low Throughput Networks (LTN); Protocols for radio interface A “, which can be downloaded free of charge.

Texas Instruments CC1310 Cortex-M3 microcontroller, released in 2015 with the promise to offer up to 20 km range, 20-year battery life on a coin cell, just happens to be compatible with MIOTY standard, although the company also mentions MIOTY was tested on two other silicon providers. At the time of writing, I was unable to find out who the other two are. Other compatible chips from TI include CC1312R and the CC1352R Cortex-M4F WiSoCs with the latter also supporting Bluetooth Low Energy.

Back in 2018, Canada based BehrTech partnered with Fraunhofer IIS to commercialize the solution, and the key ingredient for robustness (resistance to interference) is Fraunhofer IIS’ patented Telegram Splitting technology that split messages into several packets to increase immunity to interference. A whitepaper quickly explains the history of MIOTY standard:

MIOTY by Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) was adopted by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as Low Throughput Network (LTN) family Telegram-Splitting Ultra Narrow Band (TS-UNB) [5], which is based on Gaussian Minimum-Shift Keying (GMSK), a variant of FSK. The nominal range is 15 km and the battery lifetime is stated as up to 20 years. So far only one company, Behr Technologies, is commercially marketing MIOTY technology; on the gateway side they use an SDRplay RSP1a  Software-Defined Radio (SDR) chipset with proprietary userspace libraries.

The 2018 video below quickly explains how that all works.

One way to get started with the new standard is to get TI LPSTK SensorTag kit.

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8 Replies to “MIOTY Silicon Vendor Agnostic, Scalable LPWAN Standard to Take on LoRaWAN, NB-IoT”

  1. Okay, let’s see where this is going. Could be potentially be more interesting than lora. But there is a long way to really cheap modules and a good infrastructure. They also need something like TTN.

  2. “Fraunhofer IIS’ patented Telegram Splitting technology that split messages into several packets to increase immunity to interference”

    Patents are the nail in the cofin.

    Including for Lora.

    We suffered 20 years of Fraunhofer MP3 patents.

    1. Agreed. The only benefit they provided was pushing the need for license free codecs.

      “It could be that your purpose in life is to be a warning to others.”

  3. “The solution offers a star network for low-power end/leaf nodes…”

    What’s really needed is support for mesh (not star) topology, or at-least a hop-on repeat function. Without this, building out infrastructure is expensive.

    “…they use an SDRplay RSP1a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) chipset with proprietary userspace libraries.”

    I think the SDR1a uses off the shelf chips. I’m working frpm vague memory bit I think the IQ RF chip is made bt Mirics, the ADC is made by ADI, and the USB interface can be made by anybody.

    Finally, Telegram Splitting is encumbered by a Fraunhofer patent.

  4. BEHRTECH of Toronto makes a LPWAN system called MYTHINGS that looks the same as MYIOT (both are based on Fraunhofer’s Telegram Splitting – Ultra Narrow Band [TS-UNB], ETSI TS 103-357).

    BEHRTECH puts out a report titled “MYTHINGS vs. LoRa, A Comparative Study of Quality-of-Service Under External Interference, Conducted by Professor Dr. Thomas Lauterbach.” Supposedly you can download the report here:

    behrtech.com/resources/lora-vs-mythings/

    Unfortunately I could not get the BEHRTECH form you must fill out before you can download the report to work. Also, the form demands FAR too much personal information! (Talk about sales prevention.) So I did a web search looking for an end-run around, and found one. You can download the BEHRTECH report here:

    https://iotbusinessnews.com/download/white-papers/BEHRTECH-MYTHINGS-vs-LoRa.pdf

    The report says:

    “This study will prove that in real-world Industrial IoT deployments (IIoT), MYTHINGS delivers
    significantly higher interference resilience than LoRa. More specifically, it will show that in a high
    interference environment at the same network range, MYTHINGS does not lose a single
    message, while LoRa loses more than 10 percent of total messages and that when high
    interference exists, there is always a certain extent of failed LoRa transmissions, regardless of
    signal power and range.”

    The report goes on to describe the test setup, but with very few details about the type of interfering signals and/or noise added. Without this information, the tests are impossible to reproduce or interpret; the first of several fatal flaws. Next, the report presents the results.

    The results show that with no interference and at low packet error rates (the area of most interest) LoRa performs essentially the same as MYTHINGS. With high interference and at low packet error rates (PER) MYTHINGS outperforms LoRa by around 10dB in relative signal levels. However, when the MYTHINGS and LoRa test results are plotted on the same graph with the same scales, even at fairly high signal levels the LoRa PER never goes below around 3% (strange) while the MYTHINGS PER drops sharply to unmeasurable levels (as expected). To me this disparate behavior screams out: “Something is wrong with either the particular LoRa system used (MultiConnect Conduit IoT Starter Kit by Multitech) and/or there’s a problem with test setup!

    After seeing the test results, If I were the principle investigator I would NOT have published the report without resolving the unexpected and obviously flawed results from the LoRa system. I would also have tested MYTHINGS against more than one LoRa manufacturer, to not do so leaves the door open to “cherry-picking” your opponent.

    My conclusion is that this report comparing MYTHINGS vs. LoRa is not to be trusted. The only conclusion I took away from the report is that without any interferers present, the performance of MYTHINGS and one particular manufacturer’s LoRa system seems to be similar, but that’s it.

    Maybe this explains why BEHRTECH makes it so difficult and intrusive download this report – they really don’t want anyone reading it.

    1. Drone:

      I don’t want to be disrespectful but I think that you are missing the point here:

      • I went to the Company link that you referred to above and was asked to provide my name, email address, phone number, job title and Company. Having nothing to hide, I provided this information and 10 seconds later had the report in my inbox. If I am not interested and they contact me, I know that I can handle the follow up sales call. Now you as Drone may want to remain completely anonymous and that is your choice but Drone is not a likely purchaser or Drone would be providing basic business contact information. I don’t think that it is honest of you to label that process difficult and intrusive. It is not unless you want to lurk and the Company has chosen to discourage lurking;
      • Of greater interest to me, rather than getting buried in the details of a somewhat irrelevant technical analysis, is what the Company is actually doing out in the IIOT market space and how that market is responding to what the Company is offering. You might want to check the industry recognition that Behr Technologies Inc. has received in the two and a half years the Company has been carrying on business. That information is available on the website. You also might want to review the white papers and proof of concept applications. You might want to search analyst reports on the technical merits of the Company and its technology. The professor’s report does not define the Company or the technology but it seems to be the disproportionate focus of your attention;
      • LORA and Sigfox are the current major competitive technologies in the lPWAN arena; both present proprietary concerns to users through the use of their technologies likely far greater than any patent issues presented by dealing with a Fraunhofer core technology: Semtech’s control of the LORA based platforms and Sigfox data control through its French servers are factors in preventing the extreme market expansion promised for LPWAN and IIOT. Neither of these technologies have provided solutions viable in large enterprise situations, where security, scalability, reliability and legacy issues are fundamental conditions. Large scale deployment is the vaccuum in the IIOT space and none of LORA, Sigfox or NB-IoT to date have presented the necessary solutions for big business.
      • The MYTHINGS technology according to a press release posted on the Behr Technologies Inc. website in early June 2020 is currently being installed in its extensive commercial property portfolio across Canada by a large property management corporation, QuadReal Property Group,. that prides itself on being leading edge in smart building technology and property management. This is just the tip of an emerging tsunami as the market begins to appreciate the economic advantages of utilizing the BehrTech wireless protocol;
      • I would invite you to broaden the scope of your analysis here, Drone, to be out in front of the curve, and do some real due diligence in the LPWAN sector to fully appreciate the implications to the IIOT market space of the MIOTY core technology and the broader commercial MYTHINGS application, built on that base.
      • Drone, I have been studying the LPWAN and IIOT space for the past three years and have been very close to this venture and there is something very substantive here if you care to look closer.

      Regards

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