Coverage challenges for LoRaWAN IoT solutions

 One of the great advantages of LoRaWAN solutions is that one can avoid the rapacious charging and network lock-ins that Telcos have traditionally made an art form of. Some of us are old enough to remember paying Telcos a dollar a txt message (i.e. for a service of so little truly marginal cost to them they were often unable to calculate a txt message's cost precisely; and that eventually reduced in cost by three or four orders of magnitude or made entirely free). 

Another great advantage of LoRaWAN is that one can use existing networks where they are available (at a fair price) from a network utility and extend the network to places only you require at your time, convenience and cost. It is hard for a network utility to extend its network for a single user. Telco's are also focused on providing 5 nines quality of service while for the vast majority of IoT solutions, 2-3 nines is adequate and the marginal cost of extending this to get an extra 2-3 nines can not be economically justified.

If you have thousands, hundreds or, or possibly just tens, of devices in well-defined areas with no LoRaWAN current coverage it will often make sense for you to add in your own gateways i.e. otherwise you will pay pennies for each device each month and those pennies will add up.

There are several mechanisms for extending LoRaWAN coverage and they each have their pros and cons e.g. gateways (which will require backhaul and power); relays (which can handle a small number of devices at the edge of a network); direct to satellite solutions (which will have latency and cost constraints); Mesh gateways (which require using proprietary protocols).  We have been working with all of these and think they all have roles to play.

When looking at extending a LoRaWAN network, you need to know exactly what coverage you need i.e. to know exactly where you need coverage and what qualities of service you need (based on device populations). If you are at the edge of coverage for a mobile phone you can perhaps move a few meters to get better coverage. Things can't do this if they are fixed and don't know how to do this if they are mobile. So you need to know as well as you can the areas and places that coverage is needed at.

All the LoRaWAN solutions we create allow coverage to be collated and mapped.  We also dynamically track network congestion and outages. The areas and places which are surveyed to assess coverage are an expression of network requirements. These features allow both monitoring of current performance and predictive assessment of potential future gaps or issues e.g. we can see an area is becoming congested before that level of congestion materially affects the utility of the system. Our coverage measurement approach is network agnostic and will work with a mix of public and private gateways.

Our approach for extending LoRaWAN networks is predicated on as precise an understanding of the requirements as possible and a continuous assessment of the current state. 

Why has IoT failed to live up to the hype.

There is a huge potential for solutions that monitor and control things using LoRaWAN.  

Many LoRaWAN projects fail to proceed past PoC. If you want to address the problem it is helpful to understand the cause

To date adoption has been hampered by a few things: 

• emerging enabling technologies — which is now largely resolved and standards e.g. relays
• telco mindset in early adoptions — "field of dreams" build a network and they will come; and “all you need is off the shelf device” and that will deliver the value you need. 
• the inevitable failure of “inane agile” — when there are many elements and skills required in a complex solution. 
• one size fits all IoT platforms — undifferentiated IoT platforms that don't address the specific challenges of any particular technology.

New approaches and platform address the last two issues and provide a basic templated approach that can expand to a full scale implementation.

Lorawan NWAS / LNS market: AWS, TTN, Chirpstack, ThingPark

 Our LoRaWAN Core platform (LSC) is based on serverless AWS. 

Over the last four to five years we have had experience connecting devices from multiple NWAS/LNS e.g. ThingPark,  TTN, Chirpstack, etc.

It is going to be very interesting to see how the LoRaWAN NWAS develops. 

Analysis and modelling

Modelling consists of doing the analysis and recording the results in a model of some kind, whereas analysis can be considered to consists of doing the analysis and recording the results in narrative form or picture of some kind.

If the analysis is done soundly it represents 90%+ of the effort of modelling (which just becomes the activity of recording analysis). 

Design is an extended form of analysis where imagination and inventiveness is incorporated. 

The underlying thinking for analysis and design is often best supported by manual (vs computer) techniques e.g. paper, whiteboard, etc. As false precision early in thinking reduces mental plasticity through and runs the risk of cognitive dissonance impairing the quality of analysis (Cf. Rorschach tests, and note Kahneman's observation that "System 1" doesn't present the options it considered or the source data once it has formed a view based on inputs).

Modelling ensures that the analysis/design is done corrected, is recorded, and can be examined and updated. It makes it more obvious when analysis/design is incomplete.

Why then do people have the impression that doing analysis/design and recording in documents is far faster than modelling? It is because they do half baked job of and the method of presentations doesn't make it obvious. Often in fact it encourages partial analysis because the "analyst" has formed conclusions (based on prejudice e.g. what worked last time, what would suit them) and good analysis could undermine these conclusions. 

When analysis is represented narratively, unless the narrator is very skilled and extremely assiduous, the relationships between data is often not recorded explicitly and the chain or sequence of connections cannot be seen or understood. The multiple perspectives a model provides can not be used to assess finding from different angle.

Narrative form may be fine for the analyst, where it usually acts as an aide-mémoire, and the relationships (to the extent they are known) may exist in their heads. It is not OK for the person for whom the analysis is done. It usually requires oral interrogatives to determine a full understanding, and more usually this shows that thinking has not been robust.

As Box said ""All models are wrong, but some are useful". No analysis is perfect, and perhaps none is ever fully complete. What is needed is to ensure that the analysis and models are sufficient to achieve the goal.

Senet partners with Radio Bridge in the US.

Senet and Radio Bridge partner so people cant purchase Senet LoRaWAN™ network connectivity directly through Radio Bridge’s device management console which provides automatic provisioning, monitoring and configuration of low-cost wireless sensors. The Radio Bridge device management console can be used to provision, monitor, and configure sensors and build the final end-user application through a simple RESTful API interface for uplink sensor messages and downlink configuration.

Istanbul Airport implement asset tracking with LoRa geolocation.

Skysens deploy an end-to-end solution with thousands of LoRa sensors, a LoRaWAN network and applications using LoRa-based geolocation (no GPS) to monitor the location of vehicles, personnel and luggage indoor and outdoor. It aims to drive down operational costs with: predictive maintenance, asset monitoring, reduced energy consumption. 

Ref

Management of IoT Projects

In built environment engineering (bridge, building, etc.) - Work is a function of Scope. Further the "functions" are relatively well understood based on known materials, methods and calibrated based on well recorded past examples (e.g. underpinning QS). So the project management is focused on the cost, effort, time, materials etc. needed to undertake the work.

W=f(S)
Cost = f1(W, Materials Cost, Labour Cost)
Time = f2(W, Material availability, Labour availability, Dependencies)

Risk = f3(W)

In most technology projects 
S=f(W)

Which is why the traditional methods of understanding cost, time and risk fail.

Further many of the traditional things done with advanced project planning e.g. critical path and complex task scheduling, resource levelling, etc.) just don't make sense when the function for converting Work to Time isn't well enough calibrated and the dependencies between tasks (and the components produced by them) are not fully understood.

What is needed mostly is a more sophisticated way of understanding Scope. And changes to Scope as it emerges (i.e. either through elaboration of discovery of omissions).

This understand must be shared and most criticality must understood by key stakeholders such as the funder(s), the user(s), etc. NOT just the builders.