Tokyo, November 29, 2021: Rakuten Mobile, Inc. today announced that it had begun joint research and development into “IoT ultra coverage utilizing low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites” with the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Engineering.
The research topic is one of the R&D themes of the “Beyond 5G R&D Promotion Project,” which the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) recently publicly invited applications for proposals. The two organisations will use satellite communications to expand geographical coverage to 100 per cent and enable long distance communications with existing NB-IoT and IoT devices with the aim of achieving IoT ultra coverage, said Rakuten in a press release.
In the R&D, Rakuten Mobile and the University of Tokyo will leverage their respective expertise in satellite communications technology1 and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) to build an IoT network using LEO satellite communications and establish new use cases for IoT services using NB-IoT and LTE devices.
NB-IoT is a telecommunications standard for low power IoT devices that uses a very narrow band of spectrum. With NB-IoT, small amounts of data can be sent at infrequent intervals, making the standard ideal for use in IoT services which require low power consumption, such as smart meters and sensors.
Image credit: Rakuten Mobile