Connecting LoRa® and LoRaWAN®
Bringing a LoRa®-enabled device to market, where it can connect assets to cloud applications in any location, requires a service provider. These providers sell the gateways, network and applications servers that bridge the gap between innovative LoRa®-enabled sensors and their receiving applications, creating LoRa® ecosystems with seamless connectivity.
Echostar Mobile is working closely with important IoT service providers, such as The Things Industries (TTI) and Actility, to support the expansion of their customers’ terrestrial LoRaWAN® networks to encompass satellite coverage. Using interworking as a cost-effective option for customers already using the terrestrial networks of Actility or The Things Industries, EchoStar Mobile provides access to our satellite network.
Our pan-European S-band LoRa® network reaches regions and environments with poor or inexistent coverage of terrestrial networks, providing resilient bi-directional, real-time connectivity to LoRa® sensors with no requirement for additional infrastructure. With EchoStar Mobile working in partnership with The Things Industries and Actility, customers can enjoy the ubiquitous coverage and reliability benefits offered by satellite without having to implement S-band-specific frequency plans or regional parameters.
By interworking the capabilities of our pan-European S-band LoRa® network with the terrestrial ecosystems of The Things Industries and Actility, the potential of LoRa®-enabled devices can be fully unlocked, unleashing the outstanding benefits of Massive IoT to wider use cases across all areas, even in the most remote locations.
Our Partnerships
Cooperating with Actility and The Things Industries, Echostar Mobile supports the roaming of partner-owned devices over our pan-European S-band LoRa® network.
The first release of the solution will support uplink (U/L) messages only, with a drive to release the full capability of bi-directional communications to our partners’ ecosystems in the near future.
Actility
With its reliable and advanced IoT platform, Actility supports companies and operators worldwide. Managing large-scale IoT deployments with its end-to-end solutions, it provides customers with the scalable, secure solutions needed for mass adoption of their LoRa®-enabled devices.
Actility Interworking from Satellite to Terrestrial Networks
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- Passive roaming will require 3rd party EchoStar’s regional parameters implementation
- Interworking with Actility supports both UL and DL
- Class A and C are supported
- Device shall be provisioned on EchoStar’s LNS
- Frame payload forwarded based on DevEUI
Integrating EchoStar Mobile pan-European S-band LoRa® network into the ecosystem, the key elements of our extended interworking architecture are:
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- The use of an adaptation module, the ThingPark RAN Connector, which provides an adaptation stage between EchoStar Mobile’s LoRa® over the satellite network to the Actility LoRaWAN® ThingPark suite.
- The introduction of a virtual Device (vDevEUI), which is the avatar of the physical roaming device. The roaming physical device is managed entirely by EchoStar’s network server, whereas the associated virtual device is its representation over the network server of our partners (e.g., Actility).
- The partner-owned roaming devices are then fully provisioned over EchoStar’s network server (acting as a forwarding network server) with related traffic routed to the ThingPark RAN Connector API, as opposed to the EchoStar user frame interface. Our network server also completely manages the sessions with the roaming device (Mac layer processing) as it does for regular-hosted devices (EchoStar devices).
The Things Industries
The Things Industries is at the forefront of providing enterprise LoRaWAN® solutions that offer the scalability, reliability and security for customers seeking to deploy their IoT applications. With a carrier-grade LoRaWAN® Network Server, it provides customers with an innovative solution for monitoring and managing their LoRaWAN® networks.
The Things Industries’ current solution for LoRa®-enabled devices supports uplink-only messages, pushing data straight to The Things Stack Cloud via SimulateUplink – API. This option is already available in all The Things Stack distributions, and can be accessed by users who upgrade to the latest version.
Integration in The Things Industries network
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- Developed a secured NS-AD interface following LoRaWAN Back End
- Device shall be provisioned on EchoStar’s LNS
- Full duplex communication supported
EchoStar Mobile is currently working with The Things Industries to release an AS to NS (application server to network server) shared interface that supports true bi-directional LoRa® communication. This new generation solution will be released in the near future.
Watch this space for more updates!