Smart city networks are the dominant application for Low Power Area Networks. Many IoT applications in cities can be addressed with a single wireless network, but metering applications like water, gas or heat meters are still mostly using Wireless M-Bus protocol today. Wireless M-Bus today is used for short and medium range communication for walk-by or drive-by readout of meter devices. The Open Metering System Group (OMS Group e.V.), an interest group developing standards for communication interfaces for metering systems based on Wireless M-Bus, has recently published OMS Generation 5 specification, which now includes long range communication protocols, called OMS LPWAN. The TS-UNB protocol of mioty, specified in ETSI TS 103357 is part of this OMS LPWAN specification and called splitting mode. With the rollout of metering applications in smart cities using LPWAN, the number of network devices significantly increases, while the requirement on Quality of Service (QoS) is still paramount.
This presentation will give an overview on OMS Generation 5 and discuss the challenges of large scale smart city networks including utilities. It will show how mioty and its innovative channel access scheme Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA) overcomes the limitations of existing random channel schemes like ALOHA, which are common for most smart city and smart metering wireless protocols today. Examples of recent smart metering rollouts with mioty will be given, showing the benefit of the technology. Furthermore, it outlooks to future applications and challenges like control of actuators or over the air update of IoT device and how they could be integrated into smart city networks sustaining the high QoS.