Weightless: The Technology to Finally Realise the M2M Vision

The value in machines having wireless communications has long been understood and a large market predicted for many years. That this has not transpired has been because of the difficulty of meeting all the requirements for machine communications within the constraints of the available radio spectrum. These constraints changed significantly with the advent of white space which provides near-perfect spectrum with free access. However, the combination of the unique and unusual nature of that access and the very different characteristics of machine traffic compared to human traffic means that using any existing standard is far from optimal. This paper discusses the design of a new standard called Weightless which is designed and optimised for this application.