Cisco IXM-LPWA-900-16-K9 Gateway

The Cisco Wireless Gateway for LoRaWAN supports the LoRa physical layer technology and complies with the LoRaWAN specification defined by the LoRa Alliance to provide LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) wireless connectivity for low data rate, battery-powered devices and sensors. Through the unlicensed sub-GHz radio, a wide variety of Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints that require low power operation or long-range transmission distances can now be connected and located more economically than ever before. Example use cases include asset tracking, water and gas metering, environmental monitoring, waste management, smart street lighting, smart agriculture, and many others.

The Cisco Wireless Gateway for LoRaWAN is available as a standalone, or as an integral part of Cisco Industrial Asset Vision Solution, which improves business resiliency, safety, and efficiencies by monitoring equipment, people, and facilities.

This product is a carrier-grade, ruggedized product specifically designed for harsh outdoor deployments, and also suitable for indoor applications. It adheres to the Semtech next-generation (version 2) gateway hardware reference design, offers up to 16 uplink channels, and provides geolocation capabilities through Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) techniques.

Solution overview

LoRa

LoRa is a disruptive RF physical layer modulation technology that offers long-distance wireless connectivity, excellent power efficiency, very high receiver sensitivity, robust spectrum spreading, and securely encrypted transmissions. It operates on unlicensed Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) frequencies, for which 863 - 870 MHz spectrum and spectrum subsets are available for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India, and 902 - 928 MHz spectrum and spectrum subsets can be utilized in the Americas and in Asia-Pacific countries.

LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN is a MAC (Media Access Control) protocol specification defined by the LoRa Alliance that complements the LoRa physical layer. It is supported by an established ecosystem of LoRaWAN compliant devices that are available from multiple vendors, and which can be certified for interoperability by the LoRa Alliance.

The end-to-end LoRaWAN network architecture consists of four elements (Figure 1):

●Device: Endpoints such as water and gas meters, parking sensors, asset trackers, environmental sensors, or smoke detectors.

●Gateway: The wireless infrastructure required to provide radio coverage and packet forwarding for the devices, as well as IP backhaul to the network server. Cisco offerings include this Gateway and the IoT Field Network Director, which may serve as the gateway management system.

●Network server: The centralized radio controller, which performs radio management, the provisioning and authentication of devices, and the delivery of the data to one or multiple application servers through a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Cisco offers a partner network server solution and provides an SDK for this Gateway for integration with alternative network server solutions.

●Application server: allows data to be processed to fit individual use cases

LoRaWAN Network Architecture

Cisco’s LoRaWAN solution offerings are available for service provider, public sector, and enterprise customers.

Hardware overview

The Cisco Wireless Gateway for LoRaWAN supports LoRaWAN Class A, B, and C device types, spreading factors, Adaptive Data Rates (ADR), channel diversity, integrated GPS time synchronization, and geolocation with hardware support for TDOA and RSSI based trilateration. Two models are available for domestic and international customers:

●IXM-LPWA-800-16-K9: Operates on the subsets of 863 - 870 MHz ISM frequencies

●IXM-LPWA-900-16-K9: Operates on the subsets of 902 - 928 MHz ISM frequencies

(For Thailand only, 920.2-923.4 MHz)

This product is IP67 rated and can be deployed outdoors on a pole, on a service provider’s cellular base station tower, on the roof of a building, or on a wall. It can also be installed in indoor locations such as a parking garage, a basement, or a ceiling inside a building. It comes equipped with support for two powering methods (802.3at POE+ and 48 VDC), two RF antenna connectors, a GPS antenna, a USB port, and a console port, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Product interfaces and features

Key benefits

Versatile backhaul options

This product can be configured as a radio interface of the Cisco Industrial Routers 807, 809, 829, Connected Grid Router 1120 and 1240. One or multiple gateways are connected to the LAN port(s) of the IR807, IR809, IR829, CGR-1120 or CGR-1240 via Ethernet or VLANs with encrypted links. Through this configuration, it provides LoRaWAN radio access while the IR809 or IR829 offer backhaul support for Gigabit Ethernet (electrical or fiber), 4G/LTE, or Wi-Fi. This offers customers maximum flexibility in a complex network environment: access to a fiber network through a Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) interface, the ability to connect to a cellular network through a single LTE or dual-LTE radios for redundancy, and the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi infrastructure or mesh network.

In addition, this product can be deployed as a standalone unit and directly connected to existing Ethernet switches or routers through its Fast Ethernet port. In standalone, it provides both LoRaWAN radio access and essential IP networking features. This deployment option is suitable for fully secure and trusted networks; for example, customers may directly connect it to a service provider’s intranet from an access switch or router that may be available at the service provider’s cellular base station site.

Robust security

The advanced features of the Cisco IOS Software in the Cisco IR807, IR809, IR829, CGR-1120 and CGR-1240 can help customers quickly create a resilient and secure data path to their back-end platform over the public Internet. The Cisco IOS Software advanced security, firewall, routing, management, and Quality of Service (QoS) features enable you to easily overcome the challenges of relying on less secure or untrusted networks for the deployment of the LoRaWAN infrastructure. When this product is configured as a radio interface of IR807, IR809, IR829, CGR-1120 and CGR-1240 the LAN port can be set to restrict access to only the gateway, and the Ethernet link between the two devices can utilize an IP Security (IPsec) tunnel for the encrypted transport of the traffic.

This product embeds a Linux Container (LXC) inside its operating system. This virtualization can help a network server partner to easily adopt its LoRa radio control agent (Packet Forwarder). The radio control agent is strictly isolated from the host operating system, and assigned dedicated CPU and memory resources. The access privileges of the third-party software mandate that it can only run in the LXC, yet not visit the operating system kernel.

3^rd party integration

With CPF licenses, use the LoRaWAN gateways with the Network Services of your choosing, as long as these follow the Semtech’s Basic Station protocol. The Common Packet Forwarder licenses (CPF) are available as prepay subscription based model with 1, 3, or 5 year terms.

Order the licenses under the ATO PID: LORAWAN-CPF-LIC as a spare part or IXM-LORAWAN-CPF as one of the options under IXM PID.

Geolocation capability

This product is equipped with hardware support for precise timestamping and high-accuracy GPS/GNSS for geolocation applications. Customers can take advantage of this capability to approximate the position of endpoints, yet without requiring GPS/GNSS to be present in the endpoints themselves. This dramatically reduces the power consumption compared with endpoints with GPS/GNSS built in. It is particularly well suited for geofencing (presence) and coarse asset tracking use cases.

Enhanced spectrum utilization

This product features two LoRa baseband subsystems, allowing it to support up to 16 uplink channels and thus receive up to 16 data packets concurrently. This design improves the radio spectrum utilization to up to 4 MHz channel bandwidths and thereby increases the overall system capacity.

Frequency channel diversity

This product supports software-configurable frequency channel diversity. Frequency channel diversity effectively aids in the propagation of the wireless signal from endpoints to the gateway, especially in multipath environments and for geolocation applications.

Ability to deploy omnidirectional and sectorized cells

This product allows to achieve both omnidirectional and sectorized (directional) propagation patterns. Omnidirectional cells are simply established through the usage of an omnidirectional antenna with a single gateway unit, while tri-sector cells can consist of three of the gateways with a 120-degree sector antenna ^[1]   per each unit. Sectorization is useful for high-density deployments as it effectively increases the capacity of the cell.

Zero-touch provisioning

This product can be easily configured and managed by the Cisco IoT Field Network Director (FND). Zero-touch provisioning allows FND users to automatically and securely download pre-defined configurations to the gateway. Customers benefit from reduced deployment time and cost, in particular for deployments that require a large number of gateways to be installed.

Furthermore, FND supports remote gateway firmware upgrades, configuration backup and restore, IPsec tunnel setup automation and monitoring, and provides a user-friendly dashboard that includes performance statistics and alarm reports.

Product features

Table 1 summarizes the features of the Cisco Wireless Gateway for LoRaWAN.

Table 1.Features and descriptions

Product specifications

Tables 2 and 3 list the Gateway part numbers and specifications, respectively. Table 4 contains the performance specifications, and Table 5 provides product compliance information. Table 6 lists the RF antenna specifications, and Table 7 lists the GPS antenna specifications.

Table 2.Product part numbers and applicable regions

Please contact your local Cisco account representative for the region and country certification availability for each model.

Table 3.Product specifications

Table 4.Product performance specifications

Table 5.Product certification and compliance

Table 6.Product RF antenna specifications

Table 7.GPS antenna specifications

Ordering information

Table 8 provides ordering information for the Cisco LoRaWAN Gateway and associated accessories.

Table 8.Ordering information

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For more information

For more information about the Cisco wireless gateway for LoRaWAN, please visit https://www.cisco.com/go/lorawan or contact your local Cisco account representative.