Huawei, China Unicom head for IoT era

NEW DELHI: Communication service provider Huawei, China Unicom Shanghai and China Unicom Research Institute have signed an agreement to deploy Cellular Internet of Things (CIoT) Pilot based on 4.5G LTE-Machine to Machine (LTE-M) in Shanghai, prior to the 2015 Mobile World Congress (MWC) Asia.

LTE-M will help China Unicom accelerate new industry layouts and embrace the IoT era in response to the national "Internet Plus” strategy.

It is one of the key features of 4.5G and the latest CIoT technology along the LTE evolutionary path. Compared with LTE, LTE-M can increase in-depth coverage gain to up to 100 folds and number of connections to over 1,000 folds while the power consumption of the device is only 10 percent, a statement said.

LTE-M requires only 200KHz spectral resources and reuses existing network resources, which enable carriers to carry out rapid and efficient construction of LTE-M networks. These breakthroughs lay the foundation for intelligent IoT popularization.

The Smart parking system piloted in Shanghai is a typical application of LTE-M. Parking stall detectors periodically collect data and report the status to the server through LTE-M. Drivers can search for available parking spots around the city at any time using a mobile App. This system embodies one of the best applications of "Internet Plus", offering convenience to a common everyday occurrence.

"Huawei supports carriers' efforts in overcoming technical challenges encountered when entering vertical industries and helps them seize the vast potential opportunities," said William Wang, President of Huawei Wireless FDD Product Line.

"LTE-M will be commercialized globally in 2016. We have already collaborated extensively with carriers in China, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region,” added Wang.