Taking digitalisation to the next level
Ensuring a fast and secure transmission of data has become an increasingly important issue in digitalised logistics. To investigate the reliability of the various communication networks, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML joined forces with Dachser and the European Pallet Association (Epal) to conduct a pan-European study.
They fitted 50 Epal euro pallets with trackers and sent them on a journey across Europe. The result of the study: more than 148,000 km covered in one month, to examine the network coverage of various technologies along the routes taken.
Area-wide availability is important, for example, for IoT devices that communicate regularly-updated sensor data. In the study, the participants each attached five trackers with five different communication technologies to a total of 50 Epal euro pallets.
They then shipped these to 24 EU countries via Dachser’s logistics centre in Dortmund. The trackers each use different communication networks. These include radio technologies such as LPWAN (low power wide area network), of which the NB-IoT, LTE-M and Sigfox technologies were considered. NB-IoT and LTE-M transmit on a 5G-compatible licensed cellular frequency, while Sigfox operates in the licence-free spectrum.
For logistics IoT applications that require continuous reception throughout Europe, the Fraunhofer IML researchers now recommend a combination of LPWAN technologies (NB-IoT, LTE-M, Sigfox) and classic mobile communications (2G-4G).
Only in this way, they say, can pan-European data transmission be presently guaranteed (September 2021). Nevertheless, the future of connectivity for IoT devices clearly lies with LPWAN technologies. (sh)