About the project
PROBLEM
With the rising of "IoT" and “smart city” concepts, city authorities need to monitor and control “things” (public assets) of the cities for the sake of better, safer and more secure cities. However, tracking assets with classic methods is not easy. Using Bluetooth, Zigbee or Wi-Fi is not so effective because of their low-range connectivity. On the other hand, using connections like GPS or 4G is too costly in terms of power and money.
SOLUTION
At this point, we develop an IoT project "LPWAN" by using a new wireless technology LoRa, since it has the advantages of : ⚫ Long-range connectivity (5 - 10 kilometers) ⚫ Low-powered (battery life up to 5 years) ⚫ Operating on free frequencies (433 MHz, 868 MHz ) ⚫ Secure ⚫ Easy deployment ⚫ Low cost
IMPLEMENTATION
The project LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) is an IoT platform for asset tracking. The system consists of LoRa sensors connected to assets (i.e. traffic lights, signs), gateways and an application. LoRa end-nodes (sensors) regularly transmit data to gateways via wireless communication LoRaWAN protocol. When gateways receive data, they save the time of arrival. And, by using The Things Network, they send it to Google Cloud server with timestamp and gateway id. By using time difference of arrival of the signals received by each Gateway, approximate positions of the assets are calculated with multilateration algorithm. In dashboard application, all assets are listed and they are shown on Leaflet map with their calculated positions. In case of displacement of any asset (i.e. item may be stolen), notification is sent by using Slack notification.
VIDEO
A short video about the project.
Documents
- Project Proposal
- Kickoff
- Design Overview
- Retrospectives
Team
Murat Kara
Murat Kara
Bilal Özlü
Bilal Özlü
Ali Şimşek
Ali Şimşek
Emrah Kösen
Emrah Kösen
Frequently Asked Questions
What is IoT?
IoT (Internet of Things) is a system of interrelated computing devices, machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network. More simply, Internet of Things means taking all the things in the world and connecting them to the internet.
LoRa stands for "long range". It is a long-range and low-power wireless platform that is used for IoT networks. LoRaWAN is a low power, wide area networking (LPWAN) protocol based on LoRa Technology.
The Things Network is a project dedicated to building a network for the Internet of Things with LoRaWAN. It is an open-source network server that allows us to settle up connection between gateways and cloud server.
Multilateration is a geolocation algorithm. It allows us to calculate positions without GPS. Using three or more gateways, the algorithm locate a signal source (end-node). After getting timestamps from end-nodes, by comparing the time difference of arrival on each gateway, we apply multilateration algorithm to find the approximate position of the end-node. For the project, we implemented an iterative version of multilateration, first we draw a grid on the area that we want to operate, then check each point on the grid to find the position with less error rate.