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Geolocation of low-power devices is now possible with LoRaWAN and no GPS

By May 25, 2017No Comments

 

Actility, Abeeway, Cisco, and Tracktio have developed a reliable geolocation method on LoRaWAN. Traditionally, LoRaWAN has been used to transmit data from IoT devices over long distances and with very little power usage. But if the location of the IoT device needed to be tracked, you have to build a power-hungry GPS unit into the device. The addition of GPS cancels out the benefits of LoRa by eating up drastically more power than a device that has just a LoRaWAN radio.

They could triangulate an accurate location of the LoRa device without GPS by measuring the different arrival times of signals to the LoRa gateways in range of the device. This technology allows the location of low-power LoRa devices without GPS to be reliably tracked. The only downside is that the LoRa device must be within range of at least 3 LoRa gateways to calculate the location, so you would need a higher than traditional installation of LoRa gateways to leverage this new tech. The technology was able to track devices within 50m-100m of the actual location.

https://www.iot-now.com/2017/05/16/61912-actility-abeeway-cisco-tracktio-pioneer-state-art-iot-geolocation-port-barcelona/

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