Building massive IoT – Wirepas and Nordic Semiconductor create the world’s densest IoT sensor network

Wed, Dec 05, 2018 10:04 CET

Power efficiency, scalability, reliability and ease of use are some of the most obvious requirements for wireless IoT networks, but as more and more devices are being connected also the requirements for density and interference tolerance are becoming more and more important for end customers.

Wirepas Mesh on Nordic SoCs delivers an industry-leading Key Performance Indicator when it comes to density. Wirepas has been able to run a mesh network of 1500 battery-operated nRF52832 radios in a cubic meter without a single packet collision. The capability to run extremely dense networks is a result of the fully de-centralized network topology, local time synchronization and frequency agility which enables individual nodes to change the channel and timing independently and locally according to the local radio environment. This ensures that the radio spectrum is used in the most optimal manner and eliminates the chances of packet collisions in the test network.

When we first successfully ran 1,000 Nordic radios in a cubic meter, we thought that it was a rather academic KPI – who’s going to need this in real world applications? Now we are talking to end users that want to follow tens of thousands of assets all within radio range of each other. This just goes to show that the requirements in terms of mesh network performance requirements are growing fast, and we, together with our partners need to be agile to be able to serve our customers, says Teppo Hemiä, CEO @Wirepas.

Besides density, the key differentiators for Wirepas Mesh on Nordic chipsets are scalability and the class-leading power consumption for fully battery-operated systems. As an example, a routing node in Wirepas Mesh network can be an Ipv6 router and still have multi-year autonomy with commodity batteries.

Wirepas Mesh on Nordic is already deployed in several large-scale deployments in asset management, lighting and sensoring applications. A good example of real-life deployments is Smart Locks by Nokē.

Nokē has incorporated the Wirepas Mesh on Nordic Semiconductor SoC into its smart locks to allow for battery-operated two-way communication between the locks and the cloud. It allows a user to control the lock without cellular connection and experience the sophisticated features including: remote unlocking and changing keys, alarm indications based on motion sensors, and status reporting. The biggest deployment of Nokē smart locks with Wirepas Mesh on Nordic is over 3500 battery-operated smart locks in one facility.

“Wirepas and Nordic gave us a tested mesh network, that could be completely battery operated.” – Nate Perry, Director of Software Development at Nokē Inc.

Wirepas Mesh on nRF52840 – the innovation continues

Wirepas and Nordic have been working together already since 2014 when Wirepas Mesh was introduced on nRF51. Since then Wirepas has evolved into the leading mesh technology provider for industrial IoT. At the same time Nordic has introduced more advanced, efficient and versatile radio SoCs.

Wirepas Mesh will be available on the recently announced Nordic nRF52840 during Q4/2018. The nRF52840 is designed around an ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with floating Point unit (FPU) and has 1MB flash with cache and 256kB RAM. As such it can support complex and demanding applications as a single chip solution and is ideal for building products and infrastructure employing mesh networking.

The technological capabilities of Wirepas mesh on Nordic’s SoCs is just stunning, and brings almost limitless possibilities for all manner of dense interconnected application possibilities from asset tracking to security and building infrastructure. Not only are extremely large, dense networks possible they are highly secure and offer the very best in energy-performance. - John Leonard, Product Marketing Manager Nordic

The technical and commercial requirements of different IoT solutions are diverse. We as Wirepas want to free innovation in all the layers. By de-coupling HW and SW on radio level, we enable flexible best-of breed architectures which guarantee fit-for-purpose performance. Our mission is to make IoT easy and profitable for our partners and customers, now and tomorrow, Teppo Hemiä concludes.

Further information

Sebastian Linko, Vice President, Marketing, Communications and IR, +358 (0)40 023 6607, sebastian.linko(at)wirepas.com
John Leonard, Product Marketing Manager, +47 98285480, john.leonard@nordicsemi.no

Nordic Semiconductor in Brief

Nordic Semiconductor is the global leader in Bluetooth Low Energy and connectivity solutions. The award-winning nRF52 Series offer multiprotocol possibilities for Bluetooth 5 and other short-range connectivity in single System-on-Chips (SoCs). Nordic devices are all around you in a myriad of different products from fitness tracking devices to smart lighting systems to keyboards, toys and game controllers. Nordic Semiconductor is headquartered in Trondheim, Norway with R&D centers in Norway, Finland, Poland and the US. Sales and support offices are located at numerous locations across the globe.

Nordic Semiconductor - Connect:anything.

Web: www.nordicsemi.com

Twitter: @NordicTweets

Wirepas in Brief

Wirepas Mesh enables wireless IoT networking at massive scale. It is a de-centralized IoT network protocol that can be used to connect, locate and identify lights, sensors, beacons, assets, machines and meters in cities, buildings, industry, logistics and energy – with unprecedented scale, density, flexibility and reliability. It can be used on any radio hardware and on any frequency band. Wirepas has its headquarters in Tampere, Finland and offices in Australia, France, Germany, India, South Korea, the UK and the United States. Things connected – Naturally.