High Density IoT

When I was starting my adventure with low power wireless mesh networks back in 2010, radio range was the key problem. Companies developing wireless standards were looking into ways to extend the range by allowing light bulbs route messages between each other. This had been the foundation of Z-Wave and ZigBee and later Thread. Hopping a single message from A to B via C and D seemed to be the Holy Grail when the number of "smart" devices in a network was in the range of single units. Or tens of units.

 In 2014 Gartner said the average number of smart / connected devices at home in 2020 would be 500. And I believe they are close. With proliferation of widely adopted standards, such as Bluetooth, there will be nothing stopping us of putting sensors everywhere, especially for applications like occupancy sensing and asset tracking.

A typical home requires not more that three "hops" for a low power radio packet to travel from one end to another. Which gives us roughly 170 devices per hopping zone. Assuming each device has something to say every couple of seconds, we are looking into networks that should support 100 randomly generated messages per second in a shared space.

See? We are facing a completely opposite problem today. In 2010 it was "1 message per 10 seconds". In 2020 it will be "1000 messages per 10 seconds". This is the problem the IoT radio standards that are being developed today have to target. We should be designing for high density.