Here’s the inside story on the deployment and testing of a location and tracking solution for Internet of Things devices in the Port of Barcelona, Spain. As Actility tells IoT Now Transport360, it is using a low power wide area network, which it believes is an ideal communications technology for industrial IoT (IIoT) applications.
Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are ideal for industrial IoT as they enable remote sensors and devices with minimum power consumption to be connected using a long-range radio network that is extremely cost effective and straightforward to deploy. Actility is a co-inventor of LoRaWAN, an LPWAN technology which uses unlicensed ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) radio bands for bi-directional communication with IoT devices. The ability to locate and track objects, animals and people using these IoT devices is set to revolutionise industry verticals from agriculture to manufacturing.
“We believe that accurate location capabilities combined with LPWA networks are a game-changer in the logistics sector, delivering increased efficiency in resource and supply chain management, at revolutionary total cost of ownership (TCO) levels much lower than conventional cellular/GPS tracking solutions,” says Mike Mulica, the chief executive of Actility. “Geolocation and tracking could possibly be the biggest use case in the whole of the Internet of Things, based on the amount of interest we’re seeing in our location service portfolio.”
