Film could provide bendiness for wearables

Researchers at Korea University and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) have developed an ultrathin film that is transparent and highly conductive to electric current, making it suitable for use in wearable devices.

The film, produced by a cheap and simple method, is actually a mat of tangled nanofibre, electroplated to form a self-junctioned copper nano-chicken wire. It is also bendable and stretchable, offering potential applications in roll-up touchscreen displays, wearable electronics, flexible solar cells and electronic skin.

“It’s important, but difficult, to make materials that are both transparent and conductive,” said Alexander Yarin, UIC distinguished professor of mechanical engineering.

The film establishes a “world-record combination of high transparency and low electrical resistance”, the latter at least tenfold greater than the previous existing record, said Sam Yoon, professor of mechanical engineering at Korea University.

The film also retained its properties after repeated cycles of severe stretching or bending, Yarin said, an important property for touchscreens or wearables.

Manufacture begins by electro-spinning a nanofibre mat of polyacrylonitrile, or PAN, whose fibres are about one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair. The fibre shoots out like a rapidly coiling noodle, which when deposited onto a surface intersects itself a million times.

“The nanofibre spins out in a spiral cone, but forms fractal loops in flight,” Yarin said. “The loops have loops, so it gets very long and very thin.”

The naked PAN polymer doesn’t conduct, so it must first be spatter-coated with a metal to attract metal ions. The fibre is then electroplated with copper, silver, nickel or gold.

The electro-spinning and electroplating are both relatively high-throughput, commercially viable processes that take only a few seconds each, according to the researchers.

“We can then take the metal-plated fibres and transfer to any surface – the skin of the hand, a leaf or glass,” Yarin said. An additional application may be as a nano-textured surface that dramatically increases cooling efficiency.

Yoon said the “self-fusion” by electroplating at the fibre junctions “dramatically reduced the contact resistance”. Yarin noted that the metal-plated junctions facilitated percolation of the electric current and account for the nanomaterial’s physical resiliency.

“But most of it is holes,” he said, which makes it 92 per cent transparent. “You don’t see it.”

Bluetooth 5 extends range to target IoT applications

Bluetooth 5 will be coming late 2016 to early 2017 and will include significantly increased range, speed and broadcast messaging capacity. Extending the range should deliver robust, reliable IoT connections that make full-home and building and outdoor use cases a reality.

Higher speeds will send data faster and optimise responsiveness. Increasing broadcast capacity will propel the next generation of connectionless services such as beacons and location-relevant information and navigation. These Bluetooth advancements open up more possibilities and should enable Bluetooth SIG companies – now at an all-time high of 30,000 member companies – to build an accessible, interoperable IoT.

“Bluetooth 5 will transform the way people experience the IoT by making it something that happens simply and seamlessly around them,” said Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG. “Increasing operation range will enable connections to IoT devices that extend far beyond the walls of a typical home, while increasing speed supports faster data transfers and software updates for devices. And now with the ability to broadcast a much richer set of information, Bluetooth 5 will make beacons, location awareness and other connectionless services an even more relevant part of an effortless and seamless IoT experience.”

Bluetooth 5, projected for release in late 2016 to early 2017, will quadruple range and double speed of low energy connections while increasing the capacity of connectionless data broadcasts by 800 per cent. It achieves this alongside its low power performance.

With the major boost in broadcast messaging capacity, the data being transferred will be richer, more intelligent. This will redefine the way Bluetooth devices transmit information, moving away from the app-paired-to-device model to a connectionless IoT where there is less need to download an app or connect the app to a device.

More than 371 million Bluetooth enabled beacons are projected to ship by 2020, according to Patrick Connolly, principal analyst at ABI Research. With eight times the broadcast messaging capacity, Bluetooth 5 should further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services in the home automation, enterprise and industrial markets.

In scenarios where contextual awareness such as navigation and pin-point location are crucial – such as hassle-free airport navigation experiences, asset tracking of warehouse inventory, emergency response, even smart city infrastructure that helps the visually impaired be more mobile – Bluetooth 5 will send custom information people find useful in that moment without connection and application barriers.

“Today, there are 8.2 billion Bluetooth products in use, and the enhancements in Bluetooth 5 and planned future Bluetooth technical advancements mean that Bluetooth will be in more than one-third of all installed IoT devices by 2020,” said Powell. “The drive and innovation of Bluetooth will ensure our technology continues to be the IoT solution of choice for all developers.”


California-based signal processing IP company Ceva congratulated the Bluetooth SIG on the announcement of Bluetooth 5. Ceva is already engaged with multiple customers whose silicon will incorporate Bluetooth 5 features when the standard is finally ratified.

“The advancements coming in Bluetooth 5 keep the technology at the forefront of innovation and will help to transform the way people interact with the internet of things, providing them a seamless experience that is both simpler and more relevant,” said Errett Kroeter, vice president of marketing for the Bluetooth SIG. “We are pleased to see the excitement and fast implementation of this new technology from SIG members like Ceva and others throughout the product value chain, which will ultimately bring Bluetooth 5 benefits to customers around the world in the shortest time.”

Aviv Malinovitch, vice president and general manager of Ceva's connectivity business unit, added: "We are delighted with the exciting enhancements Bluetooth 5 will bring to customers and we see very strong traction in the market for these features. Indeed, we already have some licensees with silicon prototypes implementing some of these Bluetooth 5 features and we look forward to the wide scale deployment of Bluetooth 5 in due course.”

• Bluetooth SIG membership has grown over 11 per cent since the end of 2015. Its 30,000th member is start-up Blossom Group, which is building infrasound and low-frequency noise relaxation products.

“Implementing Bluetooth as our wireless technology and joining the SIG organisation was the obvious choice to ensure our products’ success,” said Luke Sanger, CEO and co-founder of Blossom Group. “Bluetooth has the ubiquity of a trusted wireless communications platform and a great history of supporting market trends and working with developers and members to produce ground-breaking products and applications. We know Bluetooth will stay ahead of the game by working with its members and embracing technological advancements – from power efficiency to IoT connectivity – to push the limits of innovation.”

Source: M2M Zone

Urban Platform Initiative

By 2025 300 million EU citizens are served by platforms within their cities;
& in short-term accelerate the adoption of Urban Platforms through an easy-to-implement templated approach, and cross-sector collaboration

Urban Platforms form a core building block by which cities better manage the current explosion in volumes of city data and more easily share this data between city services in order to improve outcomes for society. Few cities in Europe have implemented such solutions. Key blockers included: Capacity; Money (as it’s an investment with an unclear BCase); Cross-Silo breaking commitment (a leadership role).

The Urban Platform Initiative comprises three core elements:

• Demand-Side – to define common requirements, and speed adoption
• Supply-Side – to bring together EU Industry to adopt common open solutions
• Standardisation – to formalise the capture of the core content as international standards..

Click Here to download the Power Point Presentation

Wake up your city with a standard, ESPRESSO!

ESPRESSO will focus on the development of a conceptual Smart City Information Framework based on open standards. This framework will consist of a Smart City platform (the “Smart City enterprise application”) and a number of data provision and processing services to integrate relevant data, workflows, and processes. The project will build this framework by identifying relevant open standards, technologies, and information models that are currently in use or in development in various sectors. The project will analyse potential gaps and overlaps among standards developed by the various standardisation organizations and will provide guidelines on how to effectively address those shortcomings.

The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis

Annual global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte ([ZB]; 1000 exabytes [EB]) threshold by the end of 2016, and will reach 2.3 ZB per year by 2020. By the end of 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.1 ZB per year, or 88.7 EB per month, and by 2020 global IP traffic will reach 2.3 ZB per year, or 194 EB per month.

Global IP traffic will increase nearly threefold over the next 5 years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent from 2015 to 2020. Monthly IP traffic will reach 25 GB per capita by 2020, up from 10 GB per capita in 2015.

Busy-hour Internet traffic is growing more rapidly than average Internet traffic. Busy-hour (or the busiest 60‑minute period in a day) Internet traffic increased 51 percent in 2015, compared with 29-percent growth in average traffic. Busy-hour Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 4.6 between 2015 and 2020, and average Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 2.0.

Smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2020. In 2015, PCs accounted for 53 percent of total IP traffic, but by 2020 PCs will account for only 29 percent of traffic. Smartphones will account for 30 percent of total IP traffic in 2020, up from 8 percent in 2015. PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 8 percent, and TVs, tablets, smartphones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 17 percent, 39 percent, 58 percent, and 44 percent, respectively.

Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will account for two-thirds of total IP traffic by 2020. By 2020, wired devices will account for 34 percent of IP traffic, and Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 66 percent of IP traffic. In 2015, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic, at 52 percent.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) will carry nearly two-thirds of Internet traffic by 2020. Sixty-four percent of all Internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2020 globally, up from 45 percent in 2015. 

The number of devices connected to IP networks will be more than three times the global population by 2020. There will be 3.4 networked devices per capita by 2020, up from 2.2 networked devices per capita in 2015. There will be 26.3 billion networked devices in 2020, up from 16.3 billion in 2015.

Broadband speeds will nearly double by 2020. By 2020, global fixed broadband speeds will reach 47.7 Mbps, up from 24.7 Mbps in 2015.

Global Internet Video and Gaming Highlights

It would take more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2020. Every second, a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2020.

Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 percent of all IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2020, up from 70 percent in 2015. Global IP video traffic will grow threefold from 2015 to 2020, a CAGR of 26 percent. Internet video traffic will grow fourfold from 2015 to 2020, a CAGR of 31 percent.

Internet video surveillance traffic nearly doubled in 2015, from 272 petabytes per month at the end of 2014 to 516 petabytes per month in 2015. Internet video surveillance traffic will increase tenfold between 2015 and 2020. Globally, 3.9 percent of all Internet video traffic will be due to video surveillance in 2020, up from 1.5 percent in 2015.

Virtual reality traffic quadrupled in 2015, from 4.2 petabytes (PB) per month in 2014 to 17.9 PB per month in 2015. Globally, virtual reality traffic will increase 61-fold between 2015 and 2020, a CAGR of 127 percent.

Internet video to TV grew 50 percent in 2015. This traffic will continue to grow at a rapid pace, increasing 3.6-fold by 2020. Internet video to TV will be 26 percent of fixed consumer Internet video traffic in 2020.

Consumer video-on-demand (VoD) traffic will nearly double by 2020. The amount of VoD traffic in 2020 will be equivalent to 7.2 billion DVDs per month.

Internet gaming traffic will grow sevenfold from 2015 to 2020, a CAGR of 46 percent. Globally, Internet gaming traffic will be 4 percent of consumer Internet traffic in 2020, up from 2 percent in 2015.

Global Mobile Highlights

Globally, mobile data traffic will increase eightfold between 2015 and 2020. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 53 percent between 2015 and 2020, reaching 30.6 exabytes per month by 2020.

Global mobile data traffic will grow almost three times as fast as fixed IP traffic from 2015 to 2020. Fixed IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 19 percent between 2015 and 2020, while mobile traffic grows at a CAGR of 53 percent. Global mobile data traffic was 5 percent of total IP traffic in 2015, and will be 16 percent of total IP traffic by 2020.

Regional Highlights

IP traffic is growing fastest in the Middle East and Africa, followed by Asia Pacific. Traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at a CAGR of 41 percent between 2015 and 2020.

Summary of regional growth rates:

●   IP traffic in North America will reach 59.1 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 19 percent.

●   IP traffic in Western Europe will reach 28.0 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 20 percent.

●   IP traffic in Asia Pacific will reach 67.8 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 22 percent.

●   IP traffic in Latin America will reach 11.6 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 21 percent.

●   IP traffic in Central and Eastern Europe will reach 17.0 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 27 percent.

●   IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will reach 10.9 EB per month by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 41 percent.

Note:    Several interactive tools are available to allow you to create custom highlights and forecast charts by region, by country, by application, and by end-user segment (refer to the Cisco VNI Forecast Highlights tool and the Cisco VNI Forecast Widget tool).

Global Business Highlights

Business IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 18 percent from 2015 to 2020. Increased adoption of advanced video communications in the enterprise segment will cause business IP traffic to grow by a factor of 2 between 2015 and 2020.

Business Internet traffic will grow at a faster pace than IP WAN. IP WAN traffic will grow at a CAGR of 6 percent, compared with a CAGR of 21 percent for fixed business Internet and 47 percent for mobile business Internet traffic.

Business IP traffic will grow fastest in the Middle East and Africa. Business IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at a CAGR of 21 percent, a faster pace than the global average of 18 percent. In volume, Asia Pacific will have the largest amount of business IP traffic in 2019, at 11.4 EB per month. North America will be second, at 9.1 EB per month.

Forecast Overview

The current Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast projects global IP traffic to nearly triple from 2015 to 2020. Appendix A offers a detailed summary. Overall IP traffic is expected to grow to 194 EB per month by 2020, up from 72.5 EB per month in 2015, a CAGR of 22 percent (Figure 1). This growth represents only a slight tapering from last year’s projected growth rate for 2014 to 2019, which was 23 percent. It appears that global IP traffic growth is stabilizing in the 20–25 percentage range.

Figure 1.      Cisco VNI Forecasts 194 EB per Month of IP Traffic by 2020 

Source: Cisco VNI Global IP Traffic Forecast, 2015–2020

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to surpass mobile phones as the largest category of connected devices in 2018

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to surpass mobile phones as the largest category of connected devices in 2018

Between 2015 and 2021, IoT is expected to increase at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent, making up close to 16 billion of the total forecast 28 billion connected devices by 2021.

LTE subscriptions grew at a high rate during Q1 2016. There were 150 million new subscriptions during the quarter, reaching a total of 1.2 billion worldwide. Subscriptions associated with smartphones also continue to increase, and are expected to exceed those for basic phones in Q3 this year.

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