Dutch telco KPN has activated Class B, for beaconing, on its nationwide LoRaWan so it can control and easily upgrade millions of IoT devices.

The public LoRaWan is powered by Actility’s ThingPark IoT platform. It will leverage Class B’s low latency commands functionality, letting it control and upgrade millions of IoT devices for applications such as asset tracking, smart grid balancing, air quality sensing, remote patient monitoring and public emergency systems.

French firm Actility and KPN have been pioneering the development of the European IoT since 2014. Within a year of the start of the rollout in 2015, KPN was one of the first to deploy and operate a nationwide low-power wide-area LoRaWan in the world. KPN introduced services such as roaming, location and end-to-end security based on hardware, now a standard within KPN.

The network already addresses a wide variety of markets with different requirements, but sharing the common need to connect sensors cost-effectively, over long distances and in both built-up areas and wide-open countryside. KPN is leveraging ThingPark Wireless to connect objects in markets as diverse as agriculture, smart building, transport infrastructure and healthcare. For example, tens of thousands of Clickey smart building IoT sensors have already been deployed in the Netherlands using LoRa.

“As a long-time KPN partner, Clickey has been working together with KPN to test Class B features in the past years,” said Pedro de Smit, CEO of Clickey. “In 2021, we ramped up the tests, on beaconing features with static devices first, then on moving devices, and the results started to look very good. We are confident this feature will have significant importance for any nationwide LoRaWan by enabling new business opportunities. More specifically, Class B will generate lots of tracking and monitoring applications, as it enables near-real-time reaction on information or location requests, which was not before based on extreme low-power consumption.”

He said Clickey hoped to sell the first commercial Class B units in the second quarter of 2022. Clickey has existed since 2012, originally under the name Invenit BV.

With the recent activation of Class B, KPN is ready to support more LoRa devices and use cases. Where previously it was mainly about receiving uplink information from sensors, Class B makes it possible to keep devices precisely synchronised, enabling low latency control applications and multicast transmissions towards the devices.

With this, KPN says it is the first operator in the world to implement the beaconing functionality in their national production network.

In legacy Class A, no control command can be sent to a device unless it has previously sent an uplink message. This is perfect for sensing applications but requires periodic uplink transmissions when the use case also requires commands, and this overhead increases with the frequency of such uplinks.

By contrast Class B enables low latency control applications, without requiring frequent uplinks from the device, and therefore conserving power. Several device manufacturers and providers are already planning to leverage this.

A typical application would be to change the configuration of a device with immediate effect, for example switch a tracker to high frequency positioning for a lost asset. Perhaps the most striking and innovative application of Class B is to multicast control signals or data transmission.

Smart grid balancing, for example, will require near-real time commands to potentially millions of endpoints such as EV car chargers or HVAC units to adjust slightly their power consumption in real time.

Public emergency systems are another application, for example sensing earthquake warning signals to shut down millions of meters and valves within minutes. The traditional cellular M2M networks provide only multi-unicast, which cannot be used for such massive use cases.

Class B can also be leveraged to multicast firmware upgrades. For example, a smart-building application can upgrade thousands of air-quality sensors at once. KPN has worked not only on such massive file transfer applications, but also on optimised differential firmware compression schemes, which further optimise transmission delays and energy consumption.

“With the recently introduced nationwide Class B functionality, KPN made another significant step in the world of IoT and provides the foundation for a new breed of applications requiring low latency commands to millions of devices such as smart grid balancing control,” said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility. “The ability to perform mass firmware upgrades is an important step towards increased security and opens the door to the deployment of large numbers of sensors for smart buildings, for example for air quality sensing.”