Whitepapers

4 CONNECTING UTILITY ASSETS USING LORAWAN www.abiresearch.com Logistics/Asset Tracking Wirelessly tracking enterprise assets is one of the biggest opportunities in the industrial IoT market, and LPWA network technologies will play a major role by cumulatively tracking more than 9,500 million assets worldwide in the next 5 years. The biggest challenge that LoRaWAN can solve is visibility and traceability of assets across a larger portion of the supply chain that extends from indoor environments to yard environments and even across metropolitan areas and regions using a single technology. Currently, vis- ibility to assets is only available either indoors using short-range wireless technologies such as RFID, Bluetooth, UWB, or Wi-Fi, or outdoors with cel- lular or satellite technology. On February 19, 2019, an aircraft manufacturer chose Objenious for its hybrid LoRaWAN infrastructure, allowing it to track assets not only within its factories but also between factory locations using the Objenious public LoRaWAN network. Another example is asset tracking sys- tems that track vehicles transporting high-value assets. In Brazil, Maxtrack chose LoRaWAN, and by the end of 2018, has deployed more than 400,000 trackers for vehicle and cargo tracking. Industrial and Smart Manufacturing One of the key enablers of digital transformation in manufacturing is the Industrial Internet of Things. LoRaWAN-certified sensors help enable IoT applications in manufacturing to improve visibility on production flow, monitor machine health to reduce downtime, view asset utilization, and study overall operational efficiency. Industrial IoT applications benefit from LoRaWAN's low network TCO and flexibility to operate private networks to deploy wireless sensors to collect additional data points to deliver new insights. Industrial solutions from Ineo-Sense and ADVEEZ have witnessed early adoption in the automo- tive and aerospace industry. Smart Agriculture According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Na- tions, the agriculture industry will need to increase its production growth by 70% by 2050 to meet the demand of the forecasted population growth. IoT technologies will contribute to better use of resources to meet this forecasted food demand. However, falling commodity prices have made it difficult for a large block of producers, small- and medium-sized farm owners, to afford IoT technologies. LPWA network technologies enable the adoption of affordable IoT solutions in two ways: first, the availability of low-cost devices for monitoring soil moisture or livestock condition to improve crop yield or dairy yield; and second, the creation of af- fordable WAN networks to collect sensor data from LoRaWAN-certified devices in place of cellular net- works that may not be available. As noted earlier, there are multiple vendors offering gateways to build private LoRaWAN networks.

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