Podcast: Accelerating Edge Connectivity in Industrial IoT

In a recent episode of EETimes on Air, EETimes editor-in-chief spoke with Sailesh Chittipeddi, Renesas’s executive vice president, who has been keeping a close eye on the development of the market for the Industrial Internet of Things.

The following is an excerpt of their conversation:

BRIAN SANTO: So we’ve been talking about pushing closer to the edge. So in this case, I think that from your answer, some of what we’re talking about as the edge is pretty obvious. It’s the robot on a production line; it’s a drone doing surveillance for agriculture, or surveying or whatever it happens to be; it might be someone’s washer and dryer. Where was the line before? I understand the value of being able to connect an industrial robot on a manufacturing line. You want to coordinate the manufacturing line. How bad do you need to coordinate washers and dryers? So let’s talk about the push or maybe the pull of drawing things closer from the edge.

SAILESH CHITTIPEDDI: So it’s interesting question. If you even if you look at the typical washer and dryer, and this is where the example of sustainability starts to matter. You’d like to know what you can do to optimize the water consumption in your washing cycle. Given that water is a scarce resource, that certainly starts to play a much more important role. Or, for example, how much power is your dryer consuming during a typical dry cycle? And how do you optimize it? Because it’s all about efficiency. And how do you make these appliances more effective at the end of the day, so they’re less energy-consuming, that they’ve had in the past

So sensors start to play a role in that area. And the other example I’ll give you, even though this is being adopted now a little bit more, is a refrigerator. Typically, there’s a lot of wastage of stuff that you keep in your refrigerator. I don’t know about yours. Certainly in our case, that’s the case.

BRIAN SANTO: I’ll volunteer my refrigerator, yes okay.

SAILESH CHITTIPEDDI: So certainly things get spoiled. There are sensors that can be used to detect, by the odors or by other things, to dispose of certain food items that you have in your refrigerator. So that’s where the lines are being drawn, and even the refrigerator. Consuming which is the cycle that you have, and how much power is being pulled by a compressor. And what can be done to make it more efficient? Those are the kinds of examples that are starting to play a broader role in what’s happening in an industrial environment.

And microcontrollers are becoming far more ubiquitous. And these things start to matter. An even simpler, probably more consumer-ish application, if you will, is a coffee pot to figure out the typical coffee pot, you switch it on, and then you go away. And it keeps on heating up, the heating element. And you could be smart about how long the heating element is on and what you need to do to make it more effective in terms of energy consumption.

BRIAN SANTO: So another thing you were talking about was conductivity. You mentioned a couple of variations of WiFi. Let’s just briefly touch on some of the alternatives that are available. WiFi 6 was built for this sort of thing. The communications companies would love to use 5G. There are a couple of broadband companies like the cable companies that have WiFi routers in your home. How do you see that evolving?

SAILESH CHITTIPEDDI: There’s a lot of work where the 5G companies do want to get into every aspect of your life. No question about it. But you know, I see a coexistence. I actually see a coexistence between WiFi 6 and 5G. I see 5G playing a role to your access point. And after the access point it’s really WiFi 6 and 6 edge. The advantage certainly of WiFi 6 and 6 edge is in a closer environment. It works far more effectively. In a 5G scenario within a closed environment, with bounded walls and stuff, it becomes a little bit more challenging to have that.

So I think WiFi 6 edge will start to play an important role. It has a lot of features, for example, that the typical WiFi 5 doesn’t, including the lower latency, the scheduling stuff, and so on, which are very important. And then the other aspect of it that starts to matter, massive MIMO, which is another capability that you have with WiFi 6x edge. All these start to matter. And 5G, despite all the hype of it, the millimeter wave has been kind of slow to adopt still in the industry. So it’s taken quite a bit of time. And I think it’ll be a few more years before you start getting around it.

If you look at the amount of problems we’ve had in the US, even with the basic 5G adoption, with the airlines and so on, where we seem to have problems that other nations don’t. So that’s one of the things that we have to watch out for. So WiFi 6, 6 edge will probably get some adoption over proprietary protocols that exist in the marketplace, just because cost. When you adopt a standard platform, it’s going to be definitely cheaper and a better route to go. So I see that playing a role.

And I think the two of them will coexist over time. I do see a need for coexistence. And I’ll give you another beautiful thing about WiFi 6, 6 edge. With our product that we have, we’re going to be announcing a feature called Doppler imaging. And the beauty of a Doppler imaging is as it says, you can sense the distance of a person and you can direct air flows appropriately or do other things. Object detection. And all it does is you have two radios, and you’re basically localizing where the air flows and stuff goes. So those are the kinds of things that are happening in a WiFi 6, 6 edge fund that are pretty exciting.

BRIAN SANTO: Wow, that’s phenomenally precise. With systems that have never really been precise before.

SAILESH CHITTIPEDDI: Exactly. Exactly. It allows you to do things that people didn’t think about before, just by using an access point solution. So it’s going to start to make a difference. In talking to some of the leading industrial customers, what we find is they think that WiFi 6, 6 edge will be first. And as 5G starts to improve, it may start to get a little bit more increased adoption, but certainly their perspective is that WiFi 6, 6 edge will play an important role in the factory of the future. So we’ll see.

Listen to the podcast in full, or read a transcript of the episode, via EETimes: Podcast: Advancing Connectivity at the Industrial IoT Edge