mioty – wireless connectivity for smart cities and the IoT

With more than 17 billion devices connected to the networks today and the number expected to almost double to around 30 billion by 2030, numerous challenges are arising, ranging from interoperability and scalability to privacy and security, which must be addressed for this large-scale digitalisation of society to emerge.

Diehl Metering has played a lead role in developing the mioty protocol as a low power wide area network (LPWAN) solution for smart metering and other large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, such as smart water and heat metering and the wider IoT connectivity of smart cities.

Annalena Zottmann, Corporate Business Development & Partners Manager with Diehl Metering and currently vice-chair of the mioty Alliance’s Business Development Committee, shares her insights into the mioty protocol and its benefits as more devices are connected by utilities and other sectors across the economy.

What is the background to the development of mioty?

mioty was initiated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, which has a background in developing standardised communications technologies. For example, they were founders of the MP3 and the DAB+ formats.

Mioty aims to cover wide areas with a low power consumption communication area.

At the time the Fraunhofer IIS foresaw that the common LPWAN technologies such as LoRaWAN would face problems in the future, particularly for scale-up, as these were not designed for large-scale projects.

They searched for different organisations to collaborate on its requirements and technical specifications, which is when Diehl Metering became involved in its metering use cases and is one of the founding members of the mioty Alliance, driving the mioty technology to a worldwide standard.

What was Diehl Metering’s perspective on mioty at that time?

Utilities were the first to digitalise their processes and achieve a digital infrastructure of a city – it was obvious that this network could carry other use cases, and not only smart metering.

Diehl Metering is in the field of the digitalisation of smart utilities and their expansion to smart cities, which means that the networks can be identical to accommodate large numbers of sensors and devices communicating within the same bandwidth.

For example, for smart water metering, we often have many sensors in place but if one adds additional sensors, for example for parking or waste monitoring, then one may face scalability problems.

As an expert company with decades of experience with communications technologies, we understood that we needed a robust and scalable technology with low power consumption and that is what mioty is for us.

What are the unique features of this protocol and how does it overcome the challenges of the other technologies?

The magic of mioty happens in the background. Today’s technologies send their information in a single package whereas mioty uses the so-called ‘telegram splitting’ described by ETSI.

For example, mioty would split message A-B-C-D into sub-packages such as A-B, C-D, etc., and send them over different sub-frequencies and in different time slots. Therefore, one doesn’t use the full bandwidth in any time slot, reducing the pressure on that frequency at the time.

In turn, this allows better scaling with one gateway for 160,000 messages per day, which in turn provides improved reliability and battery life – three times better than LoRaWAN for example.

I would liken it to a software-defined radio standard which is usable by an interoperable system, as we have the ETSI 2.0 technology, which is an open standard that all sensor vendors and chip manufacturers can use so that there is no vendor lock-in.

This is unique and makes it even more interesting for the future.

What are the elements of the mioty ecosystem?

The mioty ecosystem encompasses gateways, sensors, platforms and analytics and is enabled by the mioty Alliance, which all manufacturers and vendors can join. {Insert resource link}

For a working system, one needs all these elements, as for other LPWAN technologies. We already have several products with mioty, such as the Hydrus 2 water meters and IZAR IoT gateways.

The total numbers aren’t available, but we have about 400,00 sensors already in the field with mioty.

What are the benefits for a utility to deploy mioty?

I’ve already mentioned the scalability benefit, another is reliability. Together these lower the total cost of ownership.

One can build up a network with a small number of antenna sites, and even adding another 100,000 sensors, one doesn’t need more of these antenna sites. Therefore, the TCOE is lower as less infrastructure is needed.

An example is the city of Erfurt, which asked Diehl Metering to do a network planning analysis comparing the coverage with mioty and LoRaWAN with an initial 30,000 water meters in the field. We found that with mioty, only 17 antenna sites were required compared to 43 sites for LoRaWAN.

In addition, the city requested a comparison with a further 60,000 sensors for a total of 90,000 in the field. The analysis indicated that with LoRaWAN the number of antenna sites would need to increase to 63, but with mioty, the number would stay at 17.

mioty is also standardised to the Open Metering System (OMS), which has led to a split mode, mioty 4 OMS, which provides all the benefits of the OMS ecosystem.

Together, these are huge benefits for utilities.

Can you go into more detail on some of the use cases?

The mioty Alliance is working with the IO-Link community to integrate IO-Link data models into the mioty standard, to deliver a protocol for wireless sensor communication for industrial machines.

At present these industrial applications use Bluetooth technology, with its limited range, up to about 2 metres, or else the communications need to be wired. This integration will enable data transfer for monitoring and automatization in the industrial sector.

Other verticals also are possible. For example, an Alliance member, Olympus, does house care use cases, where there is a lot of activity around smart building monitoring and automatisation.

Another Alliance member, AGvolution, is active in agriculture, tracking the moisture in the soil of trees in cities – again highlighting the relationship with smart city applications.

What are some of the specific deployments?

I mentioned the city of Erfurt. We also equipped the city of Nuremberg, which had previously done a LoRaWAN deployment and wanted to switch to a multi-protocol to provide further options for scaled IoT projects.

We have a big customer project in Tuscany with a high level – 40% – of water losses, who wanted the granular data mioty can provide – up to 98-99% service level for hourly data – to reduce these.

Another project in Germany is with the city of Garbsen, which during Covid-19 started tracking CO2 in public buildings. They are setting up a huge network over the city and have started bee tracking.

What future developments do you envisage?

The mioty Alliance has in the pipeline the ETSI 2.0 certification, which allows going to sub-second latency and which then gives the opportunity not only to monitor sensors but also to control them.

This will open the field of security applications such as for fire departments or people in dangerous situations who need a fast reaction time. Alliance member Swissphone is planning to use this low latency for use cases such as these.

Other possible use cases could include lighting control, which also opens future opportunities for utilities.

We believe that there will be more than one communication technology, and we see a lot of interest in the market in having a multi-protocol network with two or three technologies, enabling them to scale with one technology and do other use cases with the others.

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About Diehl Metering

Diehl Metering is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and supply of smart metering solutions. With over 150 years of experience, we empower utilities, municipalities and industries to take control of their infrastructures, bringing greater efficiency, sustainability and responsibility to the way they manage water and energy.

Our extensive range of services and solutions includes data-driven insights, IoT connectivity, fully-flexible software, and seamless intelligent metering. We have pioneered several new technologies in the metering sector and continue to develop innovations in digitalization and artificial intelligence. Our entire portfolio is founded on creating enduring value and building lasting relationships with our customers.