and design requirements of asset tracking. It then introduces a GPS and cellular narrowband system- in-package (SiP) solution from Nordic Semiconductor and shows how it can greatly simplify the implementation of GPS-enabled cellular devices for asset tracking and other agriculture and smart city IoT applications. Why asset tracking is increasingly important The ability to ship products efficiently is vital to commerce: Amazon alone shipped an estimated five billion packages in 2019, spending almost $38 billion in shipping costs – a 37% increase over 2018. For any shipping company, delays, damage, and theft place a significant strain on manufacturers, distributors, and customers. For Amazon, nearly a quarter of those shipped packages were returned, 21% because the customer received a damaged package. Amazon is by no means alone in allocating a significant portion of their budget to shipping. According to the 2020 State of Logistics report from the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), companies spent nearly
Developers of Internet of Things (IoT) and asset tracking devices and systems for industry, agriculture, and smart cities need a way to communicate over long distances at minimal power for extended periods of time. Wireless technologies such as RFID tags, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi are already widely used for asset tracking solutions, but they have limited range and consume too much power. What’s required is a combination of GPS and an adaptation of infrastructure such as cellular networks that are already widely deployed and are designed for communications at longer ranges than available with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. LTE-based cellular networks were originally designed for wide bandwidth wireless connectivity for mobile products and devices. IoT applications, on the other hand, can get by using lower power, narrowband cellular technologies such as long-term evolution for machines (LTE-M) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Still, RF/wireless design is difficult, and developers lacking extensive experience, particularly with respect to cellular, face great difficulty implementing a functioning design that optimizes wireless performance and power consumption, while also meeting international regulatory guidelines for both cellular and GPS location services, as well as specific carrier requirements.
Use a cellular and GPS SiP to implement asset tracking for agriculture and smart cities
Written by: Stephen Evanczuk Contributing Author at DigiKey
$1.7 trillion on shipping costs in 2019 – an expenditure that
accounts for 7.6% of the US gross national product (GDP). At these levels, the ability to track packages, identify delays and instances of
This article describes the trends
we get technical
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