Last Thursday I had the opportunity to attend an M2M event organized by Orange in Castelldefels’ Mediterranean Technology Park (Barcelona, Spain). The event was hosted by the Telecommunications Technology Center of Catalonia (CTTC), founded in December 2001 as the first research institute and technology center in Spain devoted to physical layer technologies for communications systems. The program, which covered the whole day, was focused on a technology called Wavenis.

Wavenis is a first-mile narrowband (less than a hundred Kbps) wireless technology for M2M applications in the sub-GHz frequency range, originally created by Coronis in 2000. Wavenis’ objective is to allow for fast and easy deployment of metro area networks composed by up to thousands of battery operated M2M devices. Despite its low power consumption (up to 500 mW of transmitted power) Wavenis allows for up to 10 km link ranges in line of sight conditions, providing at the same time long battery lifespan of around 10 years. Given the small data requirements of M2M, GPRS and SMS messages are the preferred technologies today to backhaul unlicensed M2M networks. We forecast the European M2M SMS market to surpass EUR 21 billion (US$29.2) this year, which is an indicator of the importance of M2M communications.

Despite Wavenis’ initial proprietary orientation, Coronis realized open competition is the best way for a technology to succeed; thus the Wavenis Open Standards Alliance (OSA) was founded in September 2008 to promote Wavenis technology adoption. OSA membership is open to any interested company for an annual subscription rate, and is the only way to access Wavenis’ specifications (the first version of which was released in February) and develop products (which are royalty-free as far as Wavenis is concerned). As of last Thursday, Wavenis OSA had 37 members.

In addition to Wavenis, Zigbee, a wireless technology specifically created for sensor networks, is also broadly being used for M2M wireless applications. Both Wavenis and Zigbee allow battery-powered devices to communicate wirelessly without human intervention. However, there are several fundamental differences between the two technologies, which I examine here:

Origin: Zigbee (promoted by the Zigbee Alliance, founded in 2002) has been an open standard from the beginning and adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 specification for its physical layer. As already mentioned, Wavenis was initially developed by Coronis but is now open to other companies.

Protocol stack: Zigbee technology is completely specified from the physical to the application layers, while Wavenis is focusing on a more standards based approach where the PHY and MAC layers come from Wavenis, but IPv6 is used as network layer (very good election in my opinion, given the scarce IPv4 addresses left), providing great flexibility from the transport layer upwards.

Radio: although Zigbee can theoretically also work in the sub-GHz bands addressed by Wavenis (868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in the US, and 433 MHz in Asia), only 2.4 GHz Zigbee products have been developed so far. All of these frequency bands are unlicensed.

PHY layer: in order to avoid interference between M2M networks, both technologies implement spread spectrum techniques. Zigbee chose Direct Sequence (DS SS), while Wavenis is using Frequency Hopping (FH).

Doesn’t this comparison remind you of some of Technology Wars’ past chapters? The most recent example is WiMAX vs. LTE. Wavenis OSA is trying to democratize the upper layers of the stack the same way WiMAX did compared to the complex 3GPP stack; the frequency-related issue is reminiscent of the Clearwire and Verizon marketing battle after the upper 700 MHz auction (WiMAX in 2.5 GHz vs. LTE in 700 MHz). For the physical layer, the battle parallels the 11-Mbps WiFi and Bluetooth had at the beginning of the century, supporting DS SS and FH, respectively. Given the current 35 million M2M connected devices worldwide and the forecast for 105 million in 4 years, economies of scale will be decisive. Furthermore, mesh routing has already been identified by ETSI as the next step in what it has dubbed M3N (Metropolitan Mesh Machine Networks). Now the key thing is to know which of the two technologies will get the most M2M unlicensed connections.

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Author: By Esteban Monturus, Market Analyst - Europe & Backhaul