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IoT

The relationship between patent filings and development of IoT-related technologies. By Drew Rudhall

The concept of IoT does not have a formal definition but generally refers to any physical device that can be connected to a wireless network for data exchange. The intended application of an IoT device characterizes its requirements in terms of data latency, data reliability, data bandwidth, device power consumption, device processing capability and other capabilities. Research and development in IoT technology is quietly and robustly progressing. This is apparent from analysis of patent submissions in various technology sub-domains. Since all IoT devices need to communicate over a network, patent filings in wireless technologies are accumulating. Fifth generation( 5G) cellular has been particularly important to IoT development in recent years since technical standards are being developed collaboratively by many companies to solve problems that relate to the wireless connectivity of IoT devices.

At the lower end of capability, 5G technologies include so-called Narrowband- IoT( NB-IoT), which is considered to be suitable for low-power, low-data exchange rate IoT devices.

A significant number of patent applications that mention NB-IoT in their description are published each year, as demonstrated by Figure 1. This peaked in 2021, probably reflecting NB-IoT being an important project around that time for the Third Generation Partnership Project( 3GPP), whose contributors developed the technical standards. These contributors filed patent applications to protect their innovations, which if granted and adopted into a standardized technical specification, become‘ standard essential’. However, patent filing numbers do not necessarily indicate a direct correlation to commercial relevance since technical standards need to

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