Environmental data collection uses long-range RF technology

The spread spectrum technology utilised in LoRa offers significant interference immunity with ultra-low power consumption to permit extremely long battery life. Utilising Semtech LoRa technology enables ten times greater range than competing systems and the capacity to connect tens of thousands of nodes to a single gateway in a star architecture while maintaining low power for multi-year battery operation. This will enable the next wave of applications for the IoT, smart cities, smart environments and M2M applications.

With the increased link budget and range capability of LoRa there is no need for mesh network architecture. A mesh network extends the range of the network but comes at the cost of reduced network capacity, synchronisation overhead and reduced battery lifetime due to synchronisation and hops. To take full advantage of LoRa properties in this application, Semtech has designed the gateway chip set and media access control (MAC) in addition to the end-node SX127x transceivers to permit a long-range star architecture with capacity to handle tens of thousands of nodes per gateway chip.

Homerider Systems, a subsidiary of Veolia, is a worldwide water cycle and services leader offering water utilities a complete solution to improve efficiency with a broad range of capabilities and sensors for leak detection, water quality analysis and pressure monitoring. With networks covering many large cities and more than four million end points deployed, Veolia is able to easily update these networks with additional ‘Smart City’ applications.

“On top of reducing the total cost of ownership for water management solutions, the LoRa technology provides our parent company Veolia a real market opportunity to provide cities with complementary Smart City applications thanks to its ultra-low power infrastructure,” comments Dominique Seze, President and CEO, Homerider Systems.

Alain Dantec, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Wireless, Sensing and Timing Product Group, Semtech, concluded: “We are happy to enable our partner, Homerider Systems, with a superior solution that is allowing them to capture additional market share."