What are Radio-technologies (Radio frequency Range) used to transfer data among devices?
- Bluetooth-BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol) Wearable devices generally use it i.e smartwatches, wireless headphones, smartphones etc.
- RFID(Radio Frequency Identification) Primarily used for product information and location retrieval.
- WiFi Medium range wireless data transfer technology.
- ZigBee Wireless technology having IEEE 802.15.4 *mesh network standard, specially designed for low cost and low power IOT devices for reliable and secure data transfer.
- Thread IPv6 based wireless technology having IEEE 802.15.4-2006 *mesh network standard, specially designed for low power IOT devices for reliable and secure data transfer. It enables access services on the cloud as well.
- LoRAWAN(Low Powered Wide Area network) A wireless technology built on top of LoRa radio modulation technique that can be primarily used for IoT devices. AWS IoT core has support for LoRAWAN.
- Sigfox A long range wireless technology designed for low power, low data and low cost data transmission for IoT devices.
- LTE-CatM1(Long Term Evolution Category M1) It is for IoT devices connected directly with the 4G network.
- NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) It is 3GPP low power wide area network standard that is compatible with 2G, 3G and other 3GPP standards that are designed for wide area IoT devices connectivity.
Wireless data transfer technologies can be categorized based on range like WiFi, ZigBee and Thread are for medium range data transfer. LoRAWAN, Sigfox, LTE-CatM1 & NB-IoT are for long range data transfer.
*Mesh Network refers to network topology where multiple nodes are directly connected to each other without any hierarchy to efficiently route data.
Note: Low power consumption devices are mostly used in IoT therefore radio- technologies are used accordingly that supports or provide long battery life.. There is always a trade-off between low power consumption and frequent data transfer.
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