New way of connecting things

NB-IOT:New way of connecting things Over the past few decades, the number of objects (things) connected to the internet has grown exponentially. And with the everyday development of technology, the Internet of things (IoT) has penetrated in almost every application area. It has revolutionized the way machines interact and provided cutting-edge solutions to a variety of real-life problems. As the IoT in itself is a large hood, covering almost every sphere of technology nowadays, we will be focussing  our discussion on Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in this article.  We will be exploring  NB-IoT and how it is impacting the volume of connected devices and IoT connectivity infrastructure. What all we have already? In order to connect sparsely deployed IoT devices, the present short range communication technologies like BLE, ZigBee, WiFi are not a viable solution. To get over this limitation, several Wide Area Network (WAN) technologies have been evolved such as LoRaWAN (Long Range WAN), SigFox, LTE-CatM and NB-IoT. Since these technologies are meant for low powered battery operated devices, we name them as Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies. The four key features of LPWAN technologies are Long range, low power consumption, low throughput  and low cost. As there are many LPWAN technologies, it’s very interesting to see how NB-IoT stands out. LPWAN provides voice to objects by enabling them to communicate. Consider a dustbin which is full and needs to be emptied. Using LPWAN technology, a dustbin can send a message to the user, “I am full, please empty me”, which in turn can ensure timely garbage clearance and avoid periodic manual checks on the other hand. Where does the problem lie? Existing cellular infrastructure and internet connectivity is designed keeping the humans at the centre point to fulfil their different data requirements. IoT devices...