Bidirectional radio solution for IoT & M2M applications
Allowing M2M sensor OEMs and application providers to significantly improve market adoption, a long-range bidirectional radio solution has been announced by Actility and Semtech Corporation. ThingPark Wireless is based on Semtech’s ultra-long range, bidirectional LoRa radio transceivers for end-devices and Actility’s wireless M2M gateway with an open cloud-based platform for application development.
Actility has designed ThingPark Wireless® as an off-the-shelf solution ready to support adoption of a wide-range of innovative sensor-based services such as smart parking, street lighting, fire safety systems, digital signage monitoring, EV charging, smart objects, irrigation systems, air quality control, smart meter, safety sensor metering and many more.
ThingPark Wireless® uses unlicensed Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM)-band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of M2M networks to accommodate industrial sensors for a wide range of IoT applications. The incorporation of Semtech’s LoRa spread-spectrum technology-based transceivers into ThingPark Wireless makes it possible to reliably transmit low data rate signals up to 15 km without issues related to crystal accuracy found in traditional systems for smart metering and industrial applications based on frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation.
"ThingPark Wireless and LoRa enable easy connectivity for nodes that require multi-year battery operation and complement existing M2M deployments” said François Sforza, Director, Wireless Long Range Products at Semtech. “ThingPark Wireless® will enable numerous new applications to easily connect to the cloud and increase the popularity of M2M and IoT applications.”
An open standards-based M2M application development framework
A ThingPark Wireless Smart City or Smart Building project requires only a low-cost, small antenna on a rooftop to connect sensors in a 2-5 km radius for dense cities or in a 15 km radius in countryside applications. LoRa™ technology has 5-10 dB more link budget than cellular technology for in-building penetration where cellular and GPS cannot reach.
The ThingPark Wireless® solution combines Actility’s wireless base station, an integrated backhaul network, a cloud-based platform, and simple RESTful API. This interface allows M2M application developers and cloud services providers to access sensors through a homogeneous XML-based protocol-independent syntax (oBix). Based on the ETSI M2M standard, supported by the OneM2M global partnership, ThingPark Cloud® ensures interoperability with a growing community of M2M sensors and application vendors in the fields of demand response, data loggers, energy management, home automation and security.
"This all-inclusive approach is new in the M2M world. Wireless sensor vendors are missing both a cost-effective long-range wireless network and an easy-to-use application framework,” said Olivier Hersent, Actility CEO. “ThingPark Wireless® is unique in that it empowers wireless sensor vendors with a long range network for connecting sensors and an application framework to roll-out smart applications on those end-points.”
ThingPark Cloud® also includes an optional SaaS BigData storage platform for large-scale data collection able to support real-time interactive database queries from authorized third-party application providers on large volumes of data.
ThingPark Wireless is now available from Actility.