‘Internet of Things’ range extended

13 November 2013 Telecoms, Datacoms, Wireless, IoT

IBM software and Semtech hardware have joined forces to create a system capable of transmitting data up to a distance of 15 km. The joint solution, comprised of IBM’s Mote Runner software and Semtech’s SX127x with LoRa, was demonstrated at European Utility Week in Amsterdam in October.

The companies produced some pretty impressive statistics to back up the importance of this development: according to IMS Research, there will be more than 22 billion devices connected by the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ by 2020. These new devices will generate more than 2,5 quintillion bytes of new data every day, while every hour enough information is transported on the Internet to fill seven million DVDs.

To make wireless sensor networks (WSN) easier to program and use, IBM’s Mote Runner software kit provides an open and programmer-friendly platform to connect sensor and actuator motes. The development environment comprises a complete tool chain to develop applications in high-level object-oriented languages such as Java and C#, providing support for source-level debugging and network simulations to ease application development and testing.

A web-based deployment and monitoring framework, in concert with edge and backend servers, make Mote Runner an end-to-end-solution for the development, deployment, integration and visualisation of wireless embedded applications.

This platform is now available on the Semtech SX1272 RFIC to create a system capable of covering a range of 15 km in a semi-rural environment and up to 5 km in dense urban environments. For comparison, the maximum distance today of a smart meter transceiver in Europe, utilising FSK modulation, is between 1 and 2 km.

The new sensors will utilise a star network architecture with each gateway capable of handling millions of transactions per day, making it an ideal system to easily deploy any number of applications from smart metering to remotely monitoring train tracks.

The Semtech SX127x IC for end nodes and the SX130x for gateways are extremely low-power, making the system ideal for battery operated devices. Their adaptive link rate capabilities maximise battery lifetime, improve capacity of the network and improve scalability. The LoRa modulation also provides improvement in interference robustness compared to traditional modulation techniques.

For more information contact Arnold Perumal, Avnet Kopp, +27 (0)11 319 8600, [email protected], www.avnet.co.za

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