IoT specialist Kerlink and chip company Semtech Corp have mounted an urban geolocation live-test in Aguascalientes City, Mexico.
The system used was Kerlink’s geolocation solution, Wanesy™ Geolocation. Kerlink notes that land-based geolocation leveraging the LoRaWAN open protocol uses a different technology than GPS, eliminating the requirement for costly and power-hungry data processing. Gartner forecasts that a third of the world’s 15 billion connected devices will be critically dependent on geodata by the end of 2020.
The Mexican project is the first demonstration of Kerlink’s end-to-end network environment, which combines the Wirnet iBTS 915 MHz gateways, the Wanesy Management Center, which is the company’s core network management suite, and the Wanesy Geolocation, its new geolocation solver. The experiment with Semtech provides large-scale field-testing opportunities to demonstrate the benefits of geolocation and to show the impact of the quality of coverage on accuracy, when the number of gateways and location of installation points is varied in a dense urban setting.
“Geolocation is simple to deploy and operate because each end-device can be natively located without the need to add a costly GPS module inside it,” said Yannick Delibie, Kerlink CTIO. “This dramatically optimises power consumption and reduces device hardware costs. No additional hardware is required, assuming that gateways are geolocation-ready, like Kerlink Wirnet™ iBTS gateways.”
Semtech, whose LoRa® devices and wireless radio frequency technology (LoRa Technology) transceivers are central to the implementation of LoRaWAN networks around the world, actively collaborated with Kerlink on equipment installation in Aguascalientes City, a metropolitan area of about 1 million population.
Live tests in the demonstration show promising results with CEP 95 (circular error probable with 95 percent probability) around 80 metres for moving objects, such as vehicles. This was in class A type of communication while in urban environments that can create communication multipath challenges, resulting from radio reflection generated by buildings.
This demonstration environment will also help the teams to further evaluate network and gateway-deployment geometry, which plays a significant role in geolocation performance. All of these findings will help Kerlink continuously optimise the network design and deployment it offers customers through its professional services, including geolocation services.
”The global performance of the accuracy is continuously progressing by leveraging environment learning and intelligent algorithms,” added Delibie. “The infrastructure set-up is an alive technical ecosystem of partners delivering the entire value chain with a tremendous improvement in the quality of service able to support an increasing number of concrete use cases.”
