Low Power Wide Area Wireless Solution

Connect the Unconnected

Use long-distance and unlicensed radio to connect to battery-powered IoT devices for massively deployed endpoints in city and rural areas.

Low power consumption, long distance, and unlicensed radio spectrum

The Cisco Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) Wireless solution provides long-distance, low power consumption and low data rate connectivity through the unlicensed radio spectrum. It serves IoT use cases mandating the objects be powered by batteries over a life span of years, such as asset tracking, water and gas metering, parking, street lighting, hydrant, smoke detector, trash bins, farm land, and more.

Comply with LoRa and LoRaWAN

The Cisco LPWA solution uses LoRa® technology and complies with the LoRaWAN™ specifications defined by the LoRa Alliance. It supports the frequency subset of 863–870 MHz and 902–928 MHz ISM band, up to 16 uplink channels, end-point Class A, B, and C, spreading factors, adaptive data rate, and channel diversity, as well as the geolocation by TDoA (Time Difference of Arrival) and RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator).

A total solution

The Cisco LPWA solution offers customers a fully developed and complete infrastructure. The following elements are included:

• Cisco LoRaWAN Gateway – a carrier-grade and ruggedized product complying with Semtech version 2 gateway hardware reference design
• Cisco IoT Field Network Director – the fully functional gateway management system
• Cisco partner’s LoRa Network Server – the radio controller and end-device management platform
• Cisco Asset Management – the application enablement platform

The Cisco LPWA solution provides the following key features

• Operates on the frequency subset of 863-870 MHz or 902-928 MHz ISM band
• Support Class A, B, and C endpoints
• Support up to 16 uplink channels
• Channel diversity
• Spreading factors
• Adaptive data rate
• Omni-directional or tri-sectorization gateway configuration
• Meets listen-before-talk regulation in Japan
• Geolocation by TDoA and RSSI for GPS chipset-free endpoint
• Zero-Touch Provisioning and fully functional gateway management

Applicable use cases

• Location tracking for assets, people, livestock, and transportation
• Utilities for water and gas metering
• Smart cities for street lighting, trash bin, hydrant, parking lot, manhole, and more
• Agriculture for farmland, water irrigation, cattle tracking, and more
• Environmental monitoring for air quality, noise detection, and more
• Manufacturing
• Public security

Distinguished geolocation capability

The geolocation capability offered by the Cisco solution uses multiple gateways around endpoints to calculate their location through TDoA technology and RSSI.

Compared to the traditional GPS chipset with built-in endpoints at higher power consumption, Cisco provides a lower power consumption solution to locate the endpoint without a built-in GPS chipset.

Flexible backhaul options

The Cisco LoRaWAN Gateway can be configured and managed as a virtual interface with Cisco Industrial Router 809 and 829. The gateway provides LoRa radio access and the IR809/829 offers IP backhauls, such as Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber, 4G/LTE, and Wi-Fi. This configuration can help customers easily install the gateway from complicated deployment scenarios, such as accessing local fiber networks, connecting cellular networks through a single 4G/LTE radio or dual 4G/LTE radios for redundancy, or even connecting to a Wi-Fi mesh network.

In addition, the gateway can work as a standalone unit without IR809/829. In this case, the gateway provides the IP backhaul through its built-in Fast Ethernet port and includes basic IP networking features.

Robust security

The Cisco advanced IOS features provided by IR809/829 can help customers easily create robust and secured data paths crossing a public internet to their back-end platform. The Cisco IOS advanced features including security, firewall, routing, and QoS, enable customers to easily overcome the challenges in leveraging less-secured and untrusted networks to deploy the LoRaWAN gateway. The gateway embeds a Linux Container (LXC) inside its OS. This approach strictly isolates the third-party software from the host OS with the dedicated CPU and memory resource.

Fully functional gateway network management system

Cisco IoT FND provides a fully functional network management system for the gateway. It provides zero-touch provisioning capability to automatically download pre-defined configuration data to the gateway in the initial deployment. It also offers customers the opportunity for gateway firmware upgrades, configuration file backup and restore, IPSEC tunnel setup automation and monitoring, gateway information dashboard, alarm reports, and performance statistics.

Intelligent application enablement platform

Cisco CAM for IoT Intelligence enables customers to connect the unconnected using environmental sensors to gain insight into valuable operational data, such as temperature, pressure, power, and fuel levels. It also allows users to integrate valuable information from most IP-based devices or gateways (such as IP cameras) and leverages location technologies, such as RFID and GPS, to provide geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This enables users to realize greater device utilization, improved energy optimization, more controlled operations, and increased productivity. Further, users can combine operational, device, and sensor data with any type of business data, driving end-to-end business focused key performance indicators (KPIs), such as consumption down to a serial number, or key sustainability/CSR metrics.