At this year's Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, Deutsche Telekom will be showcasing solutions for networking devices using the NarrowBand IoT standard (NB-IoT) to experts and decision-makers from the worlds of research, development and design, and to module developers.

This year the emphasis is on a range of modules and sensors for use with NB-IoT. Deutsche Telekom is driving forward this low-energy consumption technology with excellent building penetration, concentrating on the Internet of Things (IoT), and is developing new products in partnership with a community of over 200 companies and start-ups. A selection of these products will be showcased at the fair, including Gimasi's NarrowBand IoT developer kit, the Flashnet smart street lighting or the new bicycle tracking solution developed by IoT Venture.

Based on an Arduino platform, the Makers KIT NBIoT by Gimasi provides developers with the tools they need to develop new prototypes quickly and to test out NB-IoT use cases. To make it easy to take your first steps in the NB IoT development, the kit includes the Arduino circuit board, specialized sensors, a SIM card, an OLED display, a switch, a relay and temperature sensor.

Flashnet's smart street lighting, networked using NB-IoT, enables municipal and local administrations to improve their energy efficiency and to optimize maintenance plans for their street lighting network.

German start-up IoT Venture will be showcasing its NarrowBand IoT-based seek-and-find solution for IoT e-bikes and S-Pedelecs in Nuremberg, whose benefits include its long range, low energy consumption and low cost. The company plans to launch its marketing campaign in the fall of 2018.

With its efforts to enhance the NB IoT network, Deutsche Telekom is also laying down another building block for the future-readiness of the mobile network by preparing it for 5G. While there is strong demand for 5G technologies that can handle high volumes of data with low network latency, NB-IoT also plays to its strengths in narrowband applications: i.e. its extremely low power consumption and excellent building penetration.

Deutsche Telekom is also presenting its Cloud of Things in Nuremberg, an IoT platform designed to enable users to access device data and control machines remotely. With its Cloud Fieldbus, Deutsche Telekom offers a solution that allows customers to connect up their production machinery using the Profibus, Modbus and CAN bus protocols. Using the platform, a machine can be connected up to the network in a few short minutes, with no need for any additional programming. For example, the Smartbox from Pssystec Automatisierungstechnik offers users a cloud-based plug&play system monitoring solution that can also substantially improve the efficiency of plant servicing plans. Using the Modbus RTU protocol, up to 20 Modbus-enabled field devices can be connected into the Cloud of Things via the RS-485-standard serial interface. The system allows customers to configure their building services devices – including pumps, coolers, e-meters and ventilation systems – using the Cloud of Things.

Another example of how the Cloud of Things platform can be used is provided by the Testomat networked water analyzer produced by Heyl. This water analysis device can indicate more than 20 parameters in water quality, including hardness, free chlorine levels and chlorine dioxide content. Such devices are used, for example, in drinking water and in food production, but also in industrial cooling and heating systems. Thanks to their connection to the Cloud of Things, manufacturers can monitor each device remotely, allowing them to provide their customers with predictive maintenance as soon as any issue is detected.

And building dehumidifiers can also be networked via the Cloud of Things. These powerful devices are often used to help deal with water damage in private or commercial buildings, for example. They are fast and efficient, but consume electrical energy. It has been traditionally very difficult to allocate the energy costs of such devices correctly. Using the Cloud of Things platform, however, operators can now record hours of operation, productivity or faults, allowing them to allocate and charge costs accurately.

Two brand new innovations are now available for the Cloud of Things:

The Cloud of Things now supports communication via the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol, an open messaging protocol designed for Machine-to-Machine communication. As MQTT is based on the already well-established Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), it can be encrypted at any stage using either SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security).

Software Development Kit 1.0 (SDK1.0). The Cloud of Things SDK 1.0 gives integrators the tools they need to speed up the development and implementation of their software and hardware projects, and at the same time substantially reduces their software development costs. The first release of the Cloud of Things SDK 1.0 is available for the JAVA programming language.

Deutsche Telekom is currently searching for talents with entrepreneurial and start-up spirit, with a strong interest in the IoT, the cloud, big data and IT security, as well as showing networked thinking and a passion to drive on the digital transformation. The staff at the booth are looking forward to chatting with IT consultants, developers, IT architects and project managers, IoT and big data specialists about these opportunities and more.

eletter-02-22-2018