New Radio Technologies for IoT in 2024

An article by Raimo Järvenpää, Chief Product Officer, Simplex Wireless.

As an update to my earlier article on selecting the right IoT Radio technology for you IoT project, I decided to reflect on a couple of interesting upcoming IoT related Radio Technologies that were also displayed and discussed at MWC’23 in Las Vegas– RedCap

RedCap stands for Reduced Capabilities referring to the work being done in 3GPP to define New Radio (NR) specifications in 5G needed for the use cases between low complexity and high performance. NR-RedCap is used in the intrustry and comes from New Radio Reduced Capabilities. It’s not a LPWAN or a WWAN, but rather a mid-range MPWAN solution. This is for devices that are between the enhanced machine type communication (eMTC) /massive IoT (mIOT) devices and the enhanced ultra-reliable, low-latency communication (eURLLC) devices. 

Looking at the latest 3GPP Workplan Rel 17 work items seems to be pretty much done and Rel 18 is coming along nicely as well. NR-RedCap and NR-light are referring to the same thing.

So what is the big deal with RedCap?  It’s really about bridging the gap between high vs low performance, battery operated vs plugged-in, low cost vs high cost devices.  Current NB-IoT and LTE-M are the current crown prince’s for cellular connected IoT devices in 4G LTE and this will contended by NR-RedCap in cellular connected IoT devices in 5G delivering better performance in an affordable price point.

SPEED: RedCap will offer max speeds (150Mbps DL/50 Mbps UL) while NB-IoT NB1( 26kbps DL/66kbps UL) and LTE-M (1Mbps DL/1Mbps UL). So the RedCap will be able to match the LTE Cat 2-4 speeds offered today.

POWERSAVE: Redcap will have the power save capabilities like eDRX, and RRM relaxation. With eDRX the device can be in a controlled idle/inactive state and thus save radio resources. Cellular Networks can further instigate same idle/inactive states, when the device is not mobile or at the edge of the NW cell, i.e. RRM relaxations.

The estimate is that it will not be as good as NB-IoT nor LTE-M although very close to LTE-M

COST: Reduced capabilities as the words eludes towards promises cost reduction as some of the more complex operations needing a lot of logic and processing powers thus less silicon is required bringing the bill of material and design cost down. What will be the exact price points after mass rollout remains to be seen, expectation is at current CAT-1 LTE price levels.

Note some of the power save and cost reductions element will not yet available in Rel-17, but will be introduced as part of Rel-18 work items.

So what are the use cases – what needs a better bandwidth and power save capabilities (who and what wouldn’t benefit from cost savings?) Wearables and portables is one way of defining these. Redcap will be able to cater for battery operated applications, devices that would be charged every now and then like wild game / observation cameras. Maybe not ideal for application like meters or indicators that are installed and not maintained for 5-10 years, but there will be a lot of new applications with industrial high-capacity sensors that will benefit from the higher bandwidth or occasional higher bandwidth.

Right connectivity is the key component for a successful IoT solution. Let us know if you want to discuss and learn more what we as Simplex can offer and help you with.

This article was written by Raimo Järvenpää, Chief Product Officer, Simplex Wireless.