LoRa Cloud Geolocation

LoRa Cloud Geolocation Service provides simple JSON web APIs that can be easily integrated with a LoRaWAN network or application server to enable estimating the location of LoRa-based devices.

In general, LoRa allows locating devices withing approximately 50m, without the need for a geolocation hardware module and no extra power consumption. Instead, the RSSI, SNR and TOA metadata that are being sent as part of your device’s LoRa radio frames are used to estimate the location of your device. If your device can perform WiFi scans, scanning results can also be used to estimate your device’s location. This yields a significant cost reduction compared to GPS.

Also, LoRa Cloud Geolocation integration allows estimating the location of LR1110-based devices with transceiver firmware from their GNSS scans.

Three query types are supported in scope of this integration and will be demonstrated below:

• LoRa TOA/RSSI - allows computing the location estimates using TOA and/or RSSI information from a single or multiple LoRa frames (for all LoRa devices)
• GNSS - location estimates are computed from the information contained in the GNSS scan result messages (NAV messages) (for LR1110 transceiver-based devices only)
• TOA/WiFi - the initial device location estimation is performed using the scanned WiFi access points, but if this estimation is not valid, another estimation is performed based on TOA metadata from device’s LoRa radio frames (for all LoRa devices capable of performing WiFi scans)

LoRa Cloud Setup

Before you create the integration on The Things Stack, you first need to prepare the setup on LoRa Cloud.

On the LoRa Cloud portal, navigate to LoRa Cloud Geolocation.

Choose Manage tokens on the left hand menu. You will see that two tokens (Primary Token and Secondary Token) are pre-configured and you can use them in the next step.

Configure Geolocation Integration

To setup LoRa Cloud Geolocation integration, navigate to your application in The Things Stack.

On the left hand menu, select Integrations → LoRa Cloud. Click the Expand button next to the Geolocation.

Next, copy one of the aforementioned tokens from LoRa Cloud Geolocation portal. Paste the token in the Token field under the Set LoRa Cloud token section.

Choose the Query type depending on the type of data you want to use for estimating the location of your device. As mentioned earlier, you can choose LoRa TOA/RSSI, GNSS or TOA/WiFi query type.

Finish by clicking the Set token button.

Obtain Location Solutions

This section will show you how to obtain the location estimates using LoRa® TOA/RSSI, GNSS and TOA/WiFi query types.

After you obtain the location results, you can further integrate your The Things Stack application with other third-party IoT platforms to visualize them, etc.

LoRa TOA/RSSI

At this point, when your LoRa device sends any uplink message and it gets picked up by at least 3 gateways, you will notice the location estimation results present in the Location solved message in The Things Stack Live data tab, as shown below.

GNSS

When your LR1110 transceiver performs a GNSS scan and sends the resulting data in an uplink NAV message, you will see the location estimate present in the Location solved message in The Things Stack Live data tab, as shown below.

TOA/WiFi

When your LoRa device performs a WiFi scan and sends a resulting uplink message, the payload contains the MAC addresses of WiFi adapters and RSSIs of scanned WiFi networks. You need to decode this payload using the uplink payload formatter function in a way that the decoded_payload object that is a part of the uplink_message contains the access point records, like so:

"decoded_payload": {
    "access_points": [
    {
        "bssid": "14:60:80:9a:19:58",
        "rssi": -20
    },
    {
        "bssid": "fc:f5:28:7b:07:e5",
        "rssi": -80
    }
  ]
}

If estimating the location based on WiFi access point records cannot be performed, the location will be estimated using the TOA information from LoRa radio metadata and gateway location. In both cases, you will see the location estimate present in the Location solved message in The Things Stack Live data tab, as shown below.