Wireless communication standards for the Internet of Things

Cees Links, GreenPeak
EDN (February 25, 2015)

This white paper provides an overview of the most important contenders around the IoT Wireless Communication Standards. We are looking at wireless networking technologies.

For the sake of argument and to keep it simple, I have left out the cellular standards, although we do recognize that they do play an important role in the IoT (and the so-called M2M business). I also left out RFID, which can be quite useful for the IoT for security purposes, but is less contentious as it is more an electronic bar code replacement instead of doing real (two-way) communication as such.

Also for simplicity we have left out the proprietary pseudo standards like ANT+, Z-Wave and EnOcean, for the simple reason that, like other “non-standard” proprietary standards, in the long run, they will not be able to survive against industry accepted international standards.

These IoT connectivity solutions can be split up into three horizontal (combinations of) layers:
1. the Physical/Link Layer (“the connector”)
2. the Network/Transport Layer (“the wireless cable”)
3. the Application Layer (“who is doing what to whom”)

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