nBon: nB-IoT Device Protocol Stack

As per a recent report, connected devices have grown at the rate of 23% YoY in 2016. It is expected that there would be more than 14 Billion IoT devices by 2020, thereby making it implicit that the virtual ubiquitous connectivity is pervasive in our day-to-day lives. Total LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) devices market is expected to reach $27 Billion by 2020 and in the long run NB-IoT is expected to dominate proprietary LPWAN Technologies. NB-IoT has shown an immense potency on largescale 5G IoT connectivity and commercial deployments of narrowband internet of things on existing LTE networks.

Solution Overview

“nB-oN”, the NB-IoT solution from L&T Technology Services is a 3GPP Release 14 compliant Cat NB1 reference protocol stack (L1/L2/L3) for IoT low data rate devices. The typical use cases for this platform are Smart Metering (for Water, Gas and LWM2 Electricity), Smart Lighting, Asset Tracking, Smart Parking and Smart Agriculture. This reference solution is designed with low memory and low power footprint enabling seamless integration to custom target platforms.

This reference platform uses commercially off the shelf Xilinx Zynq 7020 development board with Physical and Protocol Layer stack in dual core ARM Cortex A9 and SDR based RF transceiver. The solution also has L1/L2/L3 ported on Cadence’ TenSilica Fusion F1 DSP and L2/L3 ported on ARM M4.

This solution also provides the complete IoT Device Management capability using LWM2M (DM, FOTA, SOTA).