27.02.18 | Kerlink and Semtech Test Kerlink’s Complete Geolocation Solution in Dense Urban Setting
Experiment in Mexico Will Demonstrate Accuracy &
Quality of Communication for Kerlink’s Commercial-Grade Offering
Barcelona, Spain – Feb. 27, 2018, 6:00 p.m. CET – Kerlink (ALKLK – FR0013156007), a specialist and global leader in solutions dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT), and Semtech Corporation, (Nasdaq: SMTC), a leading supplier of high-performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms, today announced an urban live-test in Aguascalientes City, Mexico, for Kerlink’s geolocation solution, Wanesy Geolocation.
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 optimizes 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.
“Optimal location of the gateways is crucial for delivering an optimized, fine time stamp for real-time tracking,” said Marc Pegulu, vice president and general manager of Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Product Group. “Kerlink’s WirnetTM iBTS Compact, based on Semtech’s industrial-grade reference design, offers improved gateway clock synchronization for its embedded GPS to further improve geolocation accuracy, especially in a dense urban area.”
Live tests in the demonstration show promising results with CEP 95 (circular error probable with 95 percent probability) around 80 meters for moving objects, such as vehicles, 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 optimize 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,” Delibie said. “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.”
Semtech and Kerlink are among the founding members of the LoRa Alliance, which recently published a white paper on geolocation using Semtech’s LoRa® technology.
Kerlink will present its solutions and show geolocation demonstration during Mobile World Congress on in booth located 8.0 C11. Ask for a demo.