# MIOTY

## Summary


MIOTY is a software-based LPWAN protocol that's targeted at IoT applications. In particular, many industrial IoT applications demand high reliability, scalability, power efficiency and mobility. High data rate is not really needed. MIOTY meets these requirements while also being an ETSI standard, TS 103 357. In addition, the MIOTY Alliance promotes the technology towards better interoperability among vendors of both endpoints and base stations. 

MIOTY is often written as mioty®. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft owns the registered trademark. Patents owned by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and Diehl Metering GmbH are licensed via Sisvel International.

## Discussion

### Given many other LPWAN protocols, why do we need MIOTY?

LPWAN protocols are many. Some operate in unlicensed spectra: LoRa, Sigfox, and ZigBee. Others (from the cellular world) operate in licensed spectra: LTE-M, EC-GSM and NB-IoT. ZigBee, LoRa and NB-IoT offer about 250kbps. LTE-M offers 1Mbps. Sigfox offers 100bps. 

In license-free spectra, where many technologies coexist, interference causes packet loss. Cellular technologies have higher power consumption. ZigBee has a mesh topology. Though ZigBee's relay nodes extend coverage, they have lower power efficiency.  Some protocols are not standardized, leading to vendor lock-in or interoperability issues. 

While these protocols have their niche applications, there are some applications that need low data rate, higher power efficiency and long range. Packet loss should be very low even in the face of interference. A single base station should be able to handle thousands of endpoints. A star topology, rather than a mesh topology, is more suited to meet these requirements. This is the space that MIOTY addresses.  


### What are the use cases for MIOTY?

MIOTY is being seen as a "low-throughput tech for last mile industrial communications". In smart grids, gas and water meters can use MIOTY. In agriculture, soil sensors and irrigation controls can use MIOTY. In smart factories and buildings, asset tracking can benefit from MIOTY. Remote sensors need long range that MIOTY provides. MIOTY can handle assets moving up to 120kph, thus making it suitable for fleet management or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. 

MIOTY is designed to support **massive IoT**, where 100,000+ endpoints can be supported by a single base station handling 1.5 million messages per day. This requirement is common in smart metering in dense urban deployments or monitoring in smart factories. 

MIOTY Alliance website shares news on recent applications. In November 2021, a project was initiated to automate and digitize RAG Austria's oil fields using Diehl Metering's MIOTY gateway. In January 2022, sensors in a MIOTY network detected in Germany the pressure wave triggered by an underwater eruption near Tonga. 


### What are the main technical details of MIOTY?

MIOTY is based on a transmission technique called **Telegram Splitting Multiple Access (TSMA)**. A telegram or packet is split into smaller packets. These are sent slowly over a longer time period. For better resilience against interference, frequency hopping is used. Data is spread across 24 uplink or 18 downlink radio bursts. System uses 24 frequencies plus 1 for Sync-burst. 

MIOTY operates in the sub-GHz range in license-free bands 868 MHz (Europe) and 915 MHz (US). Symbol rate is 2,380,371 symbols per second. Standard carrier spacing is 2,380,371Hz and channel bandwidth is 100kHz. Range is about 5km (non-LOS) and 20km (LOS). Even if 50% of the sub-packets are lost, the original information can be recovered. 

Coherent MSK or GMSK demodulation is used. Receiver sensitivity is at -139dBm. Data rate is about 400bps. 10 bytes of application data can be sent in about 400ms. At the endpoint, duty cycle can be as low as 0.1% with a power consumption of 17.8μWh per message. This means that batteries could last for 20+ years. Messages are encrypted and integrity protected. 


### Which are the different MIOTY device classes?

MIOTY defines three device classes: 

    + **Class Z**: Unidirectional and uplink only. For monitoring applications. Very high energy efficiency.
    + **Class A**: Bidirectional so that endpoints can be configured via downlink unicast messages. Communication is initiated by endpoints.
    + **Class B**: Bidirectional. Suits low latency applications. Enables control of actuators at endpoints. Supports both unicast and broadcast messages. In broadcast mode, base station sends a periodic beacon signal. This indicates the timeslots when an endpoint needs to receive.For the TS-UNB protocol family, the ETSI standard mentions classes Z and A but not class B. 


### What's the architecture of a typical MIOTY-based network?

The MIOTY system is one realization of a **Low Throughput Network (LTN)** standardized by ETSI. MIOTY is defined in the standard as TS-UNB and it specifies the air interface between endpoints and base station. In the standard, this interface is called *Interface A*. 

One or more endpoints connect via the air interface to a base station (aka access point). The system can have multiple base stations but only one Service Center (SC). SC forwards/aggregates/deduplicates data, authenticates and configures endpoints, manages base stations, and coordinates roaming to other SCs. In practice, some of these functions are done by a separate entity called the Application Center. Application Center may use various protocols (MQTT, REST, COAP) to interface to applications. In fact, the ETSI standard identifies Registration Authority (RA) that stores identifiers and credentials of endpoints. In MIOTY, these RA functions are part of the Application Center. Finally, an IoT platform handles visualization and analytics. 


### What's the current MIOTY ecosystem?

The MIOTY Alliance was formed in 2019. By 2022, it acquired 10 full members and many associated members. Members include chipset vendors, hardware manufacturers, software stack providers and application solution providers. It's goal is "to enable the most accessible, robust and efficient Massive IoT connectivity solution on the market". 

MIOTY chipsets are being made by Radiocrafts, Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics (STM32WL SoC series), etc. TI's CC1310 wireless MCU includes RF transceiver and Arm® Cortex®-M3 MCU. More powerful ones include CC1312R and CC1352R, the latter capable of BLE connectivity as well. 

Gateways are available from BehrTech (called MYTHINGS), Swissphone, Deihl Metering, WEPTECH AVA and AST-X. Some of these vendors also offer endpoint hardware plus development kits. Others such as Radiocrafts and Sentinum offer only endpoints. ResIOT plans to offer a complete MIOTY network solution that includes base station, Service Center, and Application Center. 

For the software stack, STMicroelectronics has partnered with Stackforce, which offers a multi-stack solution supporting MIOTY, LoRaWAN, Wireless M-Bus and Sigfox.  BehrTech and Swissphone have their own stacks.

## Milestones

Sep  
2011

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. files a German patent that introduces the concept of **telegram splitting**. A packet or telegram is split into smaller sub-packets that are sent over a much longer time period. In addition, sub-packets may be duplicated and sent on multiple frequencies (frequency hopping). The Fraunhofer Institute started this research in 2009. 

Dec  
2015

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. apply for a German **trademark on MIOTY**. International and U.K. trademarks are filed in May 2016. Subsequently, these applications are approved and registered. 

Jun  
2018

ETSI standardizes the telegram splitting method of transmission in **TS 103 357: Protocols for radio interface A**.  It's named Telegram Splitting Ultra Narrow Band (TS-UNB). It's the protocol used in MIOTY. 

Jul  
2018

BehrTech claims to be the first to offer a MIOTY solution that's compliant with the ETSI standard. In March 2021, in partnership with WEPTECH, BehrTech claims first low-cost MIOTY gateway. 

Nov  
2019

**MIOTY Alliance** is formed. It's founding members include Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits ISS, Texas Instruments, Diehl Metering, Diehl Connectivity Solutions, ifm, Ragsol, Stackforce and Wika. In February 2020, the Alliance is announced officially at the Embedded World 2020 in Nuremberg. The Alliance aims to provide an open, standardized and interoperable ecosystem for MIOTY that can suit industrial IoT and smart city use cases. By mid-2022, the Alliance has 10 full members and 25 associate members. 

Apr  
2020

It's announced that Sisvel International will manage the licensing of MIOTY. 

May  
2021

Bernhard, Schlicht and Kilian of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS are awarded the **Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2021** for their invention and development of MIOTY. In other news, **MIOTY Class B** is released to complement earlier classes Z and A.  

Jul  
2021

Fraunhofer IIS completes a successful test of MIOTY with a **GEO satellite** at a distance of about 38,000 km. This is in the S band at about 2 GHz. This test shows that MIOTY can be used in scenarios that are not dependent on any terrestrial infrastructure. 

Oct  
2021

At the Mobile Breakthrough Awards, BehrTech wins **Industrial IoT Solution of the Year** award for its MIOTY-BLE dual stack. The solution uses BLE 5.2 and CC1352R wireless microcontroller from Texas Instruments. Their dual stack was first announced in May 2021. 

May  
2022

At Fraunhofer IIS, researchers achieve up to **3.5 million telegrams per day per base station**. This is due to improved algorithms that can now run on ARM processors. For developers, Fraunhofer IIS also offers a MIOTY evaluation kit.