LoRaWAN continues to capture whole cities, business centers, and conglomerates so stay tuned to your local cellphone frequency bands. After reporting on Glasgow’s city center in last week’s e-zine, this time it’s Neuchâtel, Switzerland that gets GPS-free geolocation rolled out. Not by coincidence, the city is home to CSEM, the Swiss research & technology organization and a member of the LoRa Alliance.
 
Just consider that more than half of IoT applications will need geolocation, in particular applications such as smart cities, asset tracking, and agriculture. However up until now only GPS was available, which is often incompatible with the low-cost, long battery life needs of LoRaWAN nodes.

To meet this challenge CSEM applied a state-of-the-art statistical algorithm to Semtech’s time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) (not DOA J) approach to calculate the position of LoRaWAN nodes. This statistical approach, while more robust than other types of solvers, also integrates motion models to allow the tracking of moving objects. The pilot deployment used for development and testing of the solver was composed of 10 gateways located in and around the city of… Neuchâtel!

The geolocation solver is available under license from CSEM, and can be adapted and optimized for specific client requirements and applications. A Swiss bank account is preferred but not mandatory.