A Study of Technical Solutions for IoT End Devicesand an Evaluation Guide for Their Performance

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents a mechatronics master degree project held at Tritech TechnologyAB by two students from The Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden).It covers a study of the future agenda with IoT (Internet of Things) and the devel-opment of an evaluation framework for designing end devices in IoT systems. Thethesis also presents the leading technical solutions for IoT end devices and a toolfor choosing among available technologies. Lastly, the thesis reports from an in-depth study on power consumption and battery life-span of the two communicationtechniques BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and Thread.Data has been collected from literature studies by published authors, company pa-pers and from interviews with experts in the area. This data contributed to thefuture agenda prognosis, the generated evaluation framework and the collected tech-nical information. The attributes constituting the design guidance tool were statedbased on the evaluation framework. The in-depth study was carried out by runningthe two technologies on development boards where data on power consumption wascollected. The future prognosis of the IoT development was found to include 20-50 billiondevices by the year of 2020. The largest design areas appear to be within vehicleindustry, safety systems and home and city automation. Obstacles for the develop-ment seem to be a question about safety and how companies are to create a clearbusiness case out of it. Seven different subgroups of metrics were found constitutingto an evaluation framework and seven communication technologies with compatiblehardware form the basis for the developed design guide tool. In the in-depth study,data on power consumption for BLE and Thread were collected during a simple caseof sensing and transferring temperature data.