IoT connectivity standard has low power consumption

Very low power consumption on the Weightless-N provides for long battery life, measured in years from small conventional cells and leading edge innovation in design minimises both terminal hardware and network costs.

Central to the weightless proposition is its status as an open standard. Weightless is differentiated from all alternative proprietary LPWAN technologies by uniquely enabling a competitive, free and fair market that does not lock developers into using particular vendors or network service providers.

Any company is able to develop both low cost base stations and terminals using royalty free weightless technology. Networks can be owned and operated independently by any company or, typically, IoT terminal devices and applications can be produced for use cases that will rely on connection to networks operated by third parties. A Weightless terminal device can be produced for less than $2 with a weightless base station bill of materials of less than $3,000.

Weightless-N is designed around a differential binary phase shift keying 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 128bit 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.