Sierra Wireless announced the launch of the AirLink Raven RV50 gateway, the 4G long-term evolution (LTE) successor to the company’s previously deployed cellular gateway solution for energy and industrial applications, the AirLink Raven X.
The AirLink Raven RV50 offers a rugged design and low power consumption for an LTE industrial gateway, providing connectivity for remote applications, even when solar panels are the only available source of power.
Industrial infrastructure is often unmanned, remote, and critical to business operations, and so to ensure safety, security, and uninterrupted operation, a remote monitoring and control system is essential for applications such as SCADA, on pipelines and in power distribution, and intelligent traffic management systems, the company said.
“Many remote locations rely on solar panels as a power source, where power is otherwise simply unavailable, such as along a gas pipeline,” David Markland, senior product manager for Sierra Wireless, told eWEEK. “When deploying communications equipment into solar powered locations, it is highly advantageous to use gateways that have low power consumption for a number of reasons.”
The AirLink Management Service (ALMS)—a cloud management solution—provides remote device management for the RV50. It also provides alerting and monitoring of key variables such as signal strength, location, temperature and voltage.
Offering intelligence at the edge, the Raven RV50 includes the ALEOS Application Framework (AAF), an embedded programming environment for on-board data gathering, real-time data processing and alert generation.
The application framework also enables the delivery of real-time data and information, reliably and securely over LTE networks, to the Sierra Wireless IoT Acceleration Platform or to other software applications and operational systems.
The AirLink Raven RV50 provides SIM-based network operator switching, which means users just insert the SIM into the gateway and it automatically configures the new network settings.
The RV50 ships as a single product variant that works on all major North American networks, and customers can take advantage of wide-ranging network coverage in remote areas without increasing complexity.
“We are seeing increasing demand for 4G LTE solutions in the marketplace as well as LTE-Advanced for higher speed requirements,” David Climie, vice president of investor relations for Sierra Wireless, told eWEEK. “We are also working closely with the standards bodies, including 3GPP, as the industry looks to adopt new LTE-M technology, which will provide efficient cellular low power, wide area technology. LTE-M has lower radio frequency complexity, significantly reduced power consumption, better in-building signal penetration, and lower cost.”
Climie noted Sierra Wireless has committed to launching compatible modules timed with network deployments of LTE-M expected to begin in 2017.