Blog Archives - Page 15 of 18

November 2, 2015

Trilliant Acquires Ingenu’s AMI Business. Brilliant!

We announced today that Trilliant is licensing Ingenu’s RPMA machine exclusive wireless network technology to add to its stack of connectivity solutions. We’re pretty stoked about that, and so is Trilliant.

“With a multitude of proven worldwide deployments, Ingenu’s RPMA technology offers an extremely reliable and robust communications solution for smart grid connectivity,” said Andrew White, Trilliant’s chairman and chief executive officer. “The addition of RPMA to our Smart Communications Platform will provide utilities with the simplicity of one platform supporting multiple technologies that is built with open standards, and having broad industry support. Additionally, Trilliant’s decades-long expertise in AMI and smart grid integration will provide Ingenu’s utility customers with a rich set of services and solutions to manage their valuable network assets.”

Pretty nice, huh? This deal is a win-win for a few reasons. Trilliant acquires Ingenu’s AMI business. Ingenu will continue to support and develop the infrastructure needed to support Trilliant’s customers. But this transition will also allow Ingenu to continue full bore on rolling out the Machine Network, the first nationwide wireless public network dedicated exclusively to machine connectivity.

So how will this all work? Trilliant will offer RPMA’s endpoints, access points and other network infrastructure as a part of their offerings. Trilliant will be the point of contact for privately owned smart grid and smart metering applications. Of course, utilities that would like to use the public Machine Network will work directly with Ingenu.

It’s a great time to be a utility service provider wanting to get smart. The advantages of RPMA are available through private networks with Trilliant’s platform, or via the public Machine Network. We’re pleased to have inked this deal with Trilliant. We know that with RPMA enabling many of their customers, the benefits of the smart grid will be realized.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make the smart grid a reality, read our Smart Grid Case Study.

October 29, 2015

Does your network allow device security upgrades?

October 28, 2015

RPMA’s Six Security Guarantees

October 27, 2015

RPMA’s Three-Fold Philosophy on IoT Security

October 26, 2015

Why Should I Care about Security on the Internet of Things?

iot security

For many people, talking about security is about as interesting as a trip to the dentist. So why should you care about security?

If you care enough to invest in machine-to-machine connectivity, you should care about security on the Internet of Things.

In fact, Gartner proposes that overcoming security issues is the lynchpin to the Internet of Things’ success. But does it really matter if your refrigerator, oil field devices, or asset tracker can be hacked? It does. Let’s take the first example, your refrigerator. Your refrigerator itself may not be immensely valuable to hack, but the Google account credentials your refrigerator uses to display your Google calendar can be obtained because of poor security.

Caring about security is a reflection of the value of the things that should be secured and what those things are connected to. That is why Ingenu designed RPMA from the ground up to have enterprise grade security. RPMA provides six security guarantees that have been used and trusted for years by highly regulated industries such as utilities and oil and gas companies. The Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to increase our ability to control and monitor the world around us in an intelligent and often automated way. But as those connected devices increase, and become ever more interconnected, the importance of security increases. Interconnected devices are as strong as the weakest link.

So when considering security on the Internet of Things, think about how valuable your entire system of connected things is. If you are going so far as to invest in devices that are connected, then why leave off security? Investing in IoT connectivity for your business or home without security is like buying a car without locks. “But the car does what I need it to do! Security is no big deal right?” Except that the car could easily be stolen and do what somebody else needs it to do. And with IoT connectivity, the data collected is valuable, and could be used to compromise your business or worse, without your even knowing it until it is too late. No matter the data being collected, there are other patterns of your business that could be gleaned from your data collection habits and business operations.

Your data and the system that supports that data is highly valuable, don’t leave it exposed by choosing connectivity without robust security. RPMA has you covered.

To learn more about keeping secure on the Internet of Things, read our white paper, Security for the Internet of Things.

October 23, 2015

Dealing with Interference, Part 2 of 2

In our last post we started by comparing you and a friend chatting in a café while a very loud talking lady was interfering with your conversation.

rpma interference

How embarrassing would it be to tell your friend something three times and have them never even acknowledge that they heard you…ever. In the wireless world, that’s called message acknowledgement.

Without capacity, message acknowledgement isn’t possible for some LPWA providers because it’s just too costly to support in terms of network capacity. This leaves users of those technologies susceptible to failed messages. Not so with RPMA, we have message acknowledgement as well as intelligent retransmission schemes for failed packets so that the entire message doesn’t need to be resent. RPMA keeps the conversation normal and efficient, without wasted repeats, or missed sentences.

But wait, there’s more! Now imagine you and your friend can magically understand each other even with Loud Voice lady while both of you are whispering. RPMA can do that. We can detect signals that are weaker than interfering signals that share the exact same channel. Move a channel or two over from ours and the interfering signals can be way more powerful than ours and we can still pick it out nice and clean. It’s like a wireless superpower. Because of the nature of direct-sequence spread spectrum, and our industry leading receiver sensitivity (-142 dBm) we can find signals hidden deep in the noise.

Unfortunately, our narrowband brothers don’t have the same luxuries with interference. Their messages are easily destroyed by even the shortest bursts of broadband transmissions on the same frequency. RPMA is extremely robust to interference by virtue of our MAC’s ability to handle a 50% packet error rate. That means half the packets can be lost and the message still gets through. An RPMA message is like the Zombie that no matter how shot up it gets, it just keeps on moving. Except RPMA is nicer, and doesn’t want to eat brains.

You know that friend who is always cool with last minute changes in evening plans? That’s RPMA. RPMA transmissions adapt to match the available channel quality.

Our modules have transmit power control and our MAC continually adjusts the spreading factor to use the most robust waveform possible. Finally, we have 40 channels to work with in the US because of our available 80 MHz of bandwidth so we have a lot of breathing room. RPMA’s sophisticated MAC, wealth of capacity, and intelligent use of the spectrum makes it incredibly robust to interference. This robustness has been confirmed for years in actual commercial deployments. For years RPMA has supported extremely demanding industries who need reliable communication with their devices.

Put RPMA’s robust connectivity to work for you, contact us at info@ingenu.com or read more about how we deal with interference by downloading our white paper, How RPMA Handles Interference.

October 22, 2015

The Three Parts of the IoT

October 22, 2015

Dealing with Interference Part 1 of 2

You’re sitting with a friend at a café chatting about the latest viral YouTube video, when the lady at the table next to yours begins to talk on her phone.

Only she isn’t talking, she’s yelling. Her voice is far too loud and it’s obnoxious. You can’t even understand your friend anymore. In technical terms, this lady’s voice is causing interference to your conversation. M2M and IoT devices using wireless connectivity deal with the same thing, only Loud Voice lady is some other device hanging around.

In a prior post, we talked about why Ingenu unabashedly loves the 2.4 GHz band. Sometimes we get asked about how busy that band can be and what we do to deal with interference. In this post, we’re going to tell you all about how we handle interference on the 2.4 GHz band when it happens (and it does sometimes).

Interference is an issue any wireless technology will have to deal with, the question is, can it deal with it effectively.

Unlike you and your friend who can just find a table further away, many devices stay right where they are. One of the simplest ways to deal with interference is channel coding, also known as forward error correction (FEC). FEC is kind of like scrambling your message in a fancy and efficient redundant way, and then sending the scrambled message. Sure, some of the packets might get shot out of the air like clay pigeons in a Texan sky, but you are much more likely to get the message through.

The issue some LPWA providers face with FEC (that RPMA doesn’t) is the fact that it requires capacity throughput, that they just don’t have, to encode the data in a redundant way. In other words, dealing with interference is partly a function of your technology’s throughput. RPMA’s throughput is >40,000 bps uplink, and >20,000 bps downlink (FCC). Cellular providers don’t have this issue of course being consumer focused. LPWA providers however, struggle to provide this kind of interference protection with only 1-5% of RPMA’s uplink capacity and 0.02% of RPMA’s downlink capacity. This means RPMA has plenty of room to provide extremely robust transmissions and many other capabilities such as enterprise grade security and firmware downloads. Take that Loud Voice lady!

A naïve approach to protecting against interference like that is simply repeating the message a set number of times, hoping the message makes it through. That’s like you sitting there, blindly repeating what you said from start to finish several times, even if your friend got it the first time, or still repeating the whole thing even if they heard the first half but not the second half. Not only would you have a bewildered buddy, but you would also have wasted everyone’s time and energy. Waste not want not, right? But there’s more to this story.

Continue learning how RPMA intelligently handles interference, by reading our followup blog post, Dealing with Interference, Part 2.

October 21, 2015

Why RPMA Unabashedly Loves the 2.4 GHz ISM Band

Ingenu’s RPMA utilizes the 2.4 GHz ISM band. There, we said it. And we love it! The 2.4 GHz band offers many reasons why it is a practical choice for M2M communication if you are savvy enough to use it right.

At first glance some think that the 2.4 GHz band is inferior to the sub GHz band due to propagation. But this is trivially overcome with antenna diversity. In plain English, we put two antennae on our modules rather than one, because we can. The 2.4 GHz band wavelength is shorter than the 900MHz so we are able to place two antennae and still have flexible and practical small form factors. And just like that, propagation issues are overcome.

2.4GHz technology smart city As with many things, government regulations are the largest hurdle for most frequency bands, including the 900 MHz family of bands. However, the 2.4 GHz band has very favorable government regulations in both the US and Europe. For example, in the US, narrowband transmissions are restricted to 400ms (or 0.4 seconds), but this doesn’t affect RPMA as it utilizes direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation. +1 RPMA!

Another advantage of the 2.4 GHz band is the enormous amount of bandwidth available in the 2.4 GHz band. We have 80 MHz of bandwidth in the US. That means in the US we have 40 completely independent channels to choose from. And in Europe we have an enormous amount compared to only 500 kHz for the 900 MHz band.

What’s more is the 2.4 GHz band is truly available worldwide cost-free. It’s as if some worldwide organization back in the mid 20th century decided that the 2.4 GHz band should be available worldwide. Wait, they did! The 900 MHz family has the ‘family’ in its name because in Europe it is actually 868 MHz and in the US it is 915 MHz; so it isn’t actually available worldwide as a single continuous band.

RPMA was designed to utilize the 2.4 GHz band because it is available worldwide, has more bandwidth, is cost free, and has extremely favorable regulatory conditions. In the end, it isn’t just the frequency band that matters; it’s what you can do with it. And what RPMA does is simply genius.

Get a more detailed comparison of the 2.4 GHz band and 900 MHz band by reading our forthcoming white paper, Unlicensed Spectrum: 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz Compared.

October 19, 2015

Link Budget, More Than How Much You Spend on Sausage

rpma link budget

Link budget is one of those magical terms that to most people means pretty much nothing, but if understood, quickly tells us so much.

Link budget isn’t how much you pay for online ads and it isn’t the budget you have per bratwurst link either. As you may have guessed, link budget is an engineering term. Link budget is actually the single most revealing metric for any wireless technology. It measures the signal power available for transmitting messages and is measured in dB (decibels). The higher the link budget the better signals propagate, or fly through the air with reckless abandon.

Link budget can be spent on a combination of coverage area, reliability of coverage, or penetration depth. If you were to take two wireless technologies and know nothing about them except their link budget you would easily know which one can provide more coverage, coverage reliability, and coverage penetration. And all three of those things are great for your M2M and IoT connected devices.

RPMA’s link budget, at 172 dB (FCC) in actual commercial deployments, is the highest among all IoT wireless options (Cellular: 164-167 dB; LPWA: 149-157 dB). RPMA also has the leading link budget in Europe with 168 dB (Cellular: 155-158 dB; LPWA: ~161 dB). Some may wonder why there is a difference between the FCC and Europe, and it’s not because Europe has syrupy air getting in the way of wireless signals. It all comes down to government regulations (darn those politicians!). Different radio frequency bands have different regulations governing how much power can be used to send and receive signals, among other things. The less power you are allowed to use means the less link budget you’ll get.

Link budget is magical in another way: a unit increase in link budget (say 1 dB) leads to an exponential increase in coverage. So to have one more dB than cellular means we get many multiples increase in coverage, not just a single unit increase in coverage. Link budget is the end result of combining receiver sensitivity, transmission power, antenna gain, legal restrictions in various regions, the natural propagation of the band chosen and ways to enhance each. RPMA’s link budget gets its largest boost from its industry leading receiver sensitivity at -142 dBm. Receiver sensitivity indicates how weak an incoming signal can be and still be obtained by the receiver. It’s like RPMA has super sensitive ears that are able to hear even a panting snail trying to cross a busy sidewalk.

For a quick and revealing way to compare wireless technologies look at link budget as it exists in actual real world commercial deployments (because it’s easy to say you have a much higher link budget before you actually deploy in real world conditions). So, that’s your primer on link budget, spend it well.

To learn how RPMA has such incredible link budget, download our white paper, How RPMA Works, or contact us at info@ingenu.com.

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