Combining Bluetooth & Low Power Cellular for IoT

This white paper is the third in a series of guides that provide product engineers with practical advice on how to take advantage of the capabilities of the low power cellular protocols LTE-M and NB-IoT. This speaks on the process of combining Bluetooth & low power cellular for IoT. A few colleagues at Very wrote the first white paper in this series, titled Choosing the Right Route to Low-Power Cellular IoT: A User Guide to Simplifying LTE-M/NB-IoT Design Projects. In addition to providing a primer on the technologies, that white paper provided a number of best practices and caveats for engineers navigating through their first few cellular IoT design projects. The second white paper in this series, titled Cellular IoT Modem vs. Module: Navigating a Crucial Decision for IoT Design Projects, does a deep dive into one of the most critical decisions an engineering team makes in the early stages of a cellular IoT project.

This third cellular IoT white paper examines another topic that many engineering teams should think about early on in their planning processes: how to expand the use cases of LTE-M and NB-IoT by combining those two cellular technologies with Bluetooth. This white paper explores that topic in depth and also presents three innovative use cases that become possible when combining cellular IoT and Bluetooth.

This white paper from Laird is written for product engineers who are tasked with designing wirelessly-enabled devices and network deployments, but who are not RF experts who live and breathe advanced wireless engineering. If you are not the kind of specialized RF engineer who is excited to read hundreds of pages of technical documentation about LTE-M, NB-IoT, and Bluetooth 5, this white paper is for you. Our goal is to help you successfully prepare for and execute your first cellular IoT design projects without needing to have the same level of expertise as a deeply specialized RF engineer – allowing you to complete the projects in your pipeline with practical information and advice that product engineers can immediately put to use. Read more on combining Bluetooth & low power cellular for IoT here.