Chinese internet giant Tencent and Siradel, which provides advanced wireless network design and smart city planning tools, have partnered on the design of a LoRa network in key areas of Shenzhen City, in China.
As part of the network design, Siradel carried out a study to evaluate and optimize the existing IoT network based on LoRaWAN technology.
Siradel’s S_IoT tool was used to assess the current outdoor and indoor coverage and to simulate the future coverage after integration of additional gateways. The tool relies on the company’s 3D ray-tracing propagation model, Volcano, and advanced 3D visualization capabilities.
Capable of estimating a large number of dedicated IoT metrics such as the impact of the gateway geographical distribution, S_IoT also considers geolocation accuracy as a dimensioning indicator enabling use cases with mobile equipment, Siradel said.
Considering both outdoor and indoor configurations, the study enabled the precise determination of the location and number of gateways needed to achieve effective coverage targets for each scenario and for a wide range of applications including smart parking, smart metering or smart building, Siradel said.
At present, Tencent has constructed China’s largest LoRa network in Shenzhen. The simulation results of S_IoT tool show that the existing LoRa network has achieved continuous coverage of Shenzhen key areas and deep indoor coverage in some areas.
Tencent is now planning to optimize the entire network using Siradel’s_IoT tool to facilitate, speed up and reduce overall cost of the entire project and to improve the network coverage performance and user experience.
“Siradel assists operators, worldwide, in the design and optimization of their IoT network, with turn-key, time and cost saving planning solutions. We are excited to collaborate with Tencent on the deployment of their first LoRa network,” said Vincent Weis, technical account management director at Siradel.
“The results of these first steps in Nanshan District provide us with a valuable reference for planning and optimizing Shenzhen’s entire LoRa network. The Siradel study helps us to have a clear vision of the different deployment requirements for outdoor and indoor scenarios,” said a senior network engineer from TEG Network Platform Department at Tencent.
In June last year, the Chinese tech giant joined the LoRa Alliance after it had invested significantly in technology and applications for LoRaWAN technology. Tencent also provides device-edge-cloud LoRaWAN solutions on its network for a wide variety of IoT application and end users, such as government public services.
The LoRa Alliance is an open association which has the main aim of promoting the LoRaWAN protocol as an open global standard for secure, carrier-grade IoT LPWAN connectivity.
