IoT sensors have experienced dramatic growth in recent years due to the advent of low-power wireless communication technologies such as LoRa, SigFox, or narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). However, most of the sensors implementing positioning functionalities are still relying on chipsets that process the signals received from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS or Galileo, compute the user's position, and then report this position together to a remote sensor. This approach implies a high-power consumption that compromises the battery lifetime of these sensors and thus incurs a significant cost.
Loctio technology redresses this problem by exploiting the new paradigm of network- (Cloud or Edge) based snapshot GNSS positioning, which enables ultra-low power positioning for IoT devices. The key feature resides in migrating all computationally intensive tasks outside the limited resources of IoT devices, thus resulting in a dramatic reduction of power consumption without compromising the accuracy. This migrated processing into network comprises the positioning/location service Loctio is offering.
The concept relies on retaining only the GNSS radiofrequency front-end within the IoT device for conditioning and digitizing the received satellite signals. The digitized samples are then conveyed over an IoT-resident communication interface to the Cloud or Edge data center where signal acquisition and position reckoning actually take place. This is in contrast to the conventional approach as for now, where everything runs on the device as fleshed out in COTS GNSS receivers. The advantage of the proposed Cloud-/Edge-based GNSS positioning paradigm is not only to dramatically reduce the power consumption of the IoT device but also to open the door for the full exploitation of the Cloud-/Edge- computational resources. In this way, low-cost IoT devices can access advanced features such as anti-spoofing, signal authentication, and crowd-sourcing positioning, that otherwise would be reserved for high-end and professional receivers only.
