WiFi & LoRaWAN combination to achieve greatness

Paris, 8 December 2020 

During the past month of November, the LoRa Alliance brought out a new White Paper on Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Trials, summing up use cases across regions which combine these two technologies, to shed light on the great amount of disruptive use cases both Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN connectivity have allowed to develop during the past years, giving new ideas to existing market players who have deployed these technologies, and also to inspire Network Operators, Enterprises or Communities, who have deployed either Wi-Fi or LoRaWAN networks, to consider extending their offerings by deploying other complementary technology.

Until not long ago, the options for radio connectivity where scarce and focused mainly on cellular connectivity, Wi-Fi, or customized networks. It has not been until recently that companies have been able to take advantage of licensed and license-exempt spectrums to include cellular IoT, private LTE, private 5G, Wi-fi and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) IoT networks such as LoRaWAN, being Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN the most used technologies in these fields.

Getting to choose the correct multi-radio strategy is becoming more important each time to succeed in a connected world and selecting the wrong coverage can have fatal effects on the company’s strategy, as it can increase costs and deteriorate security. Luckily, both Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN are growing at a fast pace and are enabling innovative business models which support a vast array of use cases in the fields of Smart Cities, Smart Venues, Smart Transportation and Smart Homes, such as metering, predictive solutions, asset tracking and monitoring, among others. This gives the development of the Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Trials white paper an even more impactful meaning, as the combined work of 11 different global companies, from both Alliances and from all regions, these being Boingo Wireless, Charter Communications, Cisco, Kerlink, Lacuna Space, Nesten, Simplycity, Skyhook, Semtech Actility and Abeeway, gives an even more vast intake on these technologies and offers meaningful and insightful content for readers to really get to understand the power these technologies can have when applied to growing companies. 

Abeeway has taken part in the sharing of these use cases by explaining in-depth The Indoor & Outdoor Asset Tracking for Automotive Industry. This solution was created in collaboration with Volvo, HERE Technologies and Actility to help track valuable assets at the Volvo Trucks factory in France. At this plant, hundreds of racks are used to carry engines along the production chain, which are spread over 25.000 sq. meters. These racks can easily get lost, generating blocks in the entire production chain, creating the need for a connected tracking solution.

This problem was solved by covering this wide space through the combination of Wi-Fi fingerprinting technology and an industrial grade LoRaWAN network. The solution worked by allowing our Abeeway low-power consumption Industrial Trackers to collect Wi-Fi AP information – after covering the 25.000 sq of the plant with 60 Wi-Fi Aps – and relaying the measurements over LoRaWAN technology, due to Actility’s ThingPark, for accurate positioning determined by HERE. ThingPark optimized LoRaWAN controller, leverages macro-diversity to provide reliable communication through-out the factory with few gateways and BLE beacons on our Abeeway trackers which complement the location infrastructure at strategic, hard to-get-to areas and even through the hardest conditions, like when the racks go through the painting process at more than 70C. 

The solution managed to optimize the rapid roll throughout the production process, while giving accurate indoor location in a 35,000 sq. m. facility and standing the harsh conditions created at some of the production line points. 

This is only one of the many use cases addressed on this white paper, and just one more example of why Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN are two of the most adopted license-exempt technologies. Together they address a large proportion of IoT use cases with their approach for disrupting private-public business models and enabling participation in 5G success.