As anyone who has been involved with our industry knows by now, one of the biggest challenges of IoT is the end-to-end integration. Having to integrate numerous architectural components, mostly coming from different vendors, whether complying with a standard or not (when there is one!) is a time and resource consuming activity. If you are wondering what happened to the billions and billions of devices that you were promised 3 years ago, some part of the answer is behind this challenge 🙂It’s a challenge that we in our LoRa Alliance ecosystem take happily as we believe in the power of IoT and our technology.Overcoming this challenge requires collaboration. This is exactly what we did (again) recently. Semtech, TagoIO and Actility jointly developed an evaluation kit for trackers based on Semtech’s LR1110 transceiver.Building this EVK required integrating the LR1110-based tracker from Semtech, ThingPark Enterprise-based Community Platform (the network server), ThingPark Exchange (peering hub), Semtech LoRa Cloud including Join Server, and TagoIO application server.
Semtech LR1110-based tracker is by-default provisioned to use the Semtech Join Server. The EVK we built includes a LoRaWAN gateway that is pre-staged to be used with the ThingPark Community Platform. This is a network server platform that is made available to the community free-of-charge for any non-commercial use. In order to let that platform peer with the Semtech Join Server, ThingPark Exchange is used in between the two. Semtech JS being connected to the ThingPark Exchange makes it ready to peer with any other network server on the same peering platform.As for getting the tracker app data processed, the ThingPark Community Platform is integrated with the TagoIO’s application server. Well, thanks to that integration, now any ThingPark customer can use the TagoIO servers.And behind their server, TagoIO has also integrated with the Semtech’s LoRa Cloud in order to enable TagoIO-hosted LR1110-based devices to be managed by that Semtech service.The integration we performed not only enabled this EVK (available on ThingPark Market), but also any other application in need of using a combination of platforms/services from Semtech, TagoIO, and Actility.This was a good mix of standards, collaboration, determination and hard work bringing us one step closer to unlocking the Massive IoT.
About the writer: Alper Yegin, Vice-Chair of LoRa Alliance, Director of Advanced Technology Development in ActilityAlper Yegin is a technology architect involved in research, design, and standardization of IoT and mobile technologies. He is currently serving as the Sr. Director of Standards and Advanced Technology Development at Actility, the leading system vendor in the IoT LPWAN field, and Vice Chairman of BoD and Chairman of the Technical Committee at the LoRa Alliance. Prior to his current post, he has worked for Samsung Electronics Research Center where he led the 5G IP mobility, 4G WiMAX security, and ETSI M2M security design projects. He has made essential contributions to the design and standardization of networking technologies including Mobile IP, IPv6, Zigbee IP, and PANA during his tenure at Samsung, DoCoMo USA Labs, and Sun Microsystems. He has been actively involved in international standards organizations such as IETF, 3GPP, ETSI, LoRa Alliance, Zigbee Alliance, and WiMAX Forum at contributor and committee chair capacities. He is a past member of IETF Wireless and IPv6 Forum Technical Directorates, author of numerous telecom-related standards and papers with 16 granted and several pending patents.