23 June 2015

Siting of base stations to support an efficient, low cost city-wide network is an important part of the deployment planning process, says Nwave.

The central London network has been dubbed a “Weighless-N Smart City network”, and has been deployed in conjunction with Digital Catapult, a national initiative to support new technology.

Weightless-N operates in the sub-1GHz, licence-exempt ISM spectrum using ultra narrow band (UNB) technology.

Nwave says the network features signal propagation characteristics, leading to a range of several kilometres, even in challenging urban environments such as the city of London.

Very low power consumption provides end points with exceptionally long battery life measured in years from small conventional cells, and innovative design minimises both terminal hardware and network costs.

Siting of base stations to support an efficient, low cost city-wide network is an important part of the deployment planning process, says Nwave.

Peter Karney, head of engineering at Digital Catapult, says Weightless-N technology is “a key enabler for Smart City projects not just across the capital but around the world”.

He adds: “We are looking forward to opening this up to our network to enable them to continue to showcase the UK’s innovation in this area. We will be leading an open call in the near future allowing these innovators to register their interest in the project.”

Network modelling predicts coverage encompassing well known London landmarks including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London to the south and the Emirates Stadium to the north.

Independent real world signal verification will shortly be carried out to provide an accurate coverage map and this will be published on the Weightless website when complete.

Yury Birchenko, CEO of Nwave Technologies, described the network as “a groundbreaking milestone – the first public network deployment from Nwave since the publication of the Weightless-N open standard”.

Weightless-N is designed around a differential binary phase shift keying (DBPSK) digital modulation scheme to transmit within narrow frequency bands using a frequency hopping algorithm for interference mitigation and enhanced security.

It provides for encryption and implicit authentication using a shared secret key regime to encode transmitted information via a 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm.

The technology supports mobility with the network automatically routing terminal messages to the correct destination. Multiple networks, typically operated by different companies, are enabled and can be co-located.

Each base station queries a central database to determine which network the terminal is registered to in order to decode and route data accordingly.