MulteFire Alliance completes new specification optimized for IoT

The MulteFire Alliance announced the completion of its Release 1.1 specification that’s optimized for IoT, adding support for eMTC-U and NB-IoT as well as support for additional spectrum bands. MulteFire 1.0 was designed to create new wireless networks by operating LTE-based standalone technology in unlicensed or shared spectrum bands. MulteFire 1.1 takes if further by improving on the performance of 1.0 for the global 5 GHz unlicensed band and by adding new capabilities and support for the additional spectrum bands, according to Asimakis Kokkos, chair, Technical Specification Group at the MulteFire Alliance and head of Industry Environment Strategy at Nokia. One of the enhancements has to do with scheduling. A few short years ago, the Wi-Fi community was very concerned about LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) and Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) and how they would manage coexistence with Wi-Fi in unlicensed spectrum. Wi-Fi uses a listen-before-talk (LBT) etiquette that Wi-Fi advocates feared would be challenged by less polite LTE-based technologies. When you have a dense network with small cells and want to move fast in the IoT world, you might encounter delays in handover with LBT. To solve that, the alliance developed a scheduling system, giving the UE the capability to transmit uplink without having to wait for the base station to tell it to do so.It offloads the traffic and makes it easier for everybody—“Very simple and very efficient,” Kokkos told FierceWirelessTech.