The adoption of mobile IoT all across the globe is skyrocketing at an unforeseen rate. The mobile IoT location tracker assists in gauging this increasing expansion, offering valuable insights on market availability and the progress of the larger ecosystem. Mobile IoT location tracking enables businesses to remain current with the growth of the market, keeping track of the volume of modules, network launches, development kits, open labs, and so on.
Tracking of people, assets, and animals has been in existence since the launch of individual GPS, during the early 2000s. In the past 3-4 years a plethora of communication and positioning technologies have emerged, continuously obliterating a 15-years long innovation status quo characterized by the hardware combination of a cellular network, a cellular modem and a GPS module. The success of mobile IoT location tracking is dependent on multi-technology solutions that leverage Wi-Fi, LP-GPS, Bluetooth, cellular and more while concentrating on next-generation LPWAN.
What is the Market Saying About Mobile IoT Location Tracking?
As predicted by Research and Markets, the revenues from IoT location tracking will hit a whopping $49 billion this year.
Connecting IoT-based objects is currently a huge market that is progressing dramatically. Integrating location tracking to this presents an entire range of new applications that were hitherto impossible. Some of these applications include:
- Pets and animal tracking
- Tracking solution for skiers
- Elderly and disabled care
- Working safety for oil and gas
- Parcel bags and logistics tracking
- Bike/anti-theft scooter rental
- Fleet management
- Asset management
The applications above indicate a massive existing market which can only be dominated with extremely low power and low cost trackers.
The Impacts of Mobile IoT Location Tracking
Advanced communication opportunities
Around 2015/2016, the communication platform for IoT application cases was affected by low power communication techs, particularly Sigfox and LoRa, functioning in unauthorized radio range, resulting in an inexpensive (hardware and subscription), low-band width communication frequency, adequately in alignment with location iot tracking conditions (transmitting little data pieces: lat/long).
Consequently, the cellular communication sector reacted with competitive low power technologies like NB-IoT and LTE-M. Simultaneously, the virtualization of the SIM card (e-sim) which has been long awaited, is beginning to give extra simplicity and choice in the cellular sphere.
Finally, a myriad of new IoT satellite communication competitors (Eutelsat ELO, Kineis, Astrocast, Lacuna Space, Myriota, and many more), are presently growing to provide low cost IoT communication channels with indeed worldwide coverage, encompassing the whole planet through low orbit satellite constellations. These organizations will contend with existing M2M Satcom vendors including Inmarsat, Thuraya, Globalstar, Orbcomm.
Coherent indoor/outdoor position determination
Although positioning with Wi-Fi and cell-ID is definitely not a new thing, they are however again in more demands for undiscovered IoT markets where coherent indoor/outdoor location as well as low power is compulsory.
LPWAN, including Sigfox, LoRa, are equally sharing their respective network based location strategies which typically have the benefit of being hardware-free with absolutely no power impact on the receiving device.
Hundreds of businesses, in the indoor location tracker IoT market, are currently providing centimeter or decimeter level location precision, utilizing and combining different radio signals: UWB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID.
Particularly for Bluetooth, close marketing with signal warning has not become a huge market, and a lot of organizations have directed their operations towards location and asset tracking.
The evolution of GNSS
In the same manner GPS is no longer the only available GNSS solution. A vast range of other constellations is freely available to choose from: Beidou, Galileo, Glonas, including their local augmentation platforms. In addition, these GNSS solutions have also been enhancing with, for instance, dual bands receivers.
GNSS accuracy and precision (that is, correction programs) has been a great area of research as well, most remarkably facilitated by the self-driven car use case, with several impressive outcomes and exciting opportunities for mobile IoT location tracking.
Future trends of mobile IoT location tracking
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The rise of IoT and location tracking
The growth of IoT is skyrocketing exponentially with the increasing demands for geo-location services. It is expanding at a rapid rate according to the rising billions of IoT-integrated devices.
The sophisticated applications can generate precise data concerning the location of individuals and their devices in this region to pivot the app logic into active environments. A location tracking system is a virtual sensor which offers the location of physical entities from the viewpoint of an IoT, since operating this virtual sensor is dependent on information obtained from several physical sensors including accelerometers, barometers, and radio receivers that are joined with data processing algorithms and signals.
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Integration of location tracking within mobile IoT platforms
Integrating location tracking systems within IoT platforms will open up new opportunities in the growth of IoT geo-location use cases. The innovation in location tracking is steadily changing from the distribution of location-conscious devices to the deployment of integrated geo-location services that optimize data mining and analytics to facilitate location consciousness among business operations.
Businesses will be providing better ways to take advantage of location data in their day-to-day operations as the developers have a growing opportunity to produce the next generation location-conscious services by providing numerous advantages before the other competitors. It is also pertinent to consider some challenges or encumbrances during the integration of location tracking services within IoT systems.
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Offering aid to several use cases established on a single location setting
There is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ location innovation or technology that will be suitable for all use cases. Therefore, the applicability of every location tracking technology will be based on multi-dimensional conditions for the use cases such as scope, object number, precision, autonomy, and the size of the physical infrastructure.
A number of emerging location trackers will spread awareness among IoT systems by assisting these numerous methods to fulfill the conditions necessary for such distinct use case.
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Scalable and low-power indoor operations
As of now, the IoT systems are being executed in large-scale infrastructures through an interconnection of these elements they are provided to operate on battery power. Location tracking-aware infrastructures are managing low power and scalability conditions at the same time.
The Challenges of Mobile IoT Asset Tracking
Whether it’s containers, trucks, or cars, keeping track of useful assets on the go is a big challenge for several big, distributed companies engaged in supply chain and logistics management. These big businesses usually depend on associates like distributors to register check-in and check-out processes appropriately.
The registration procedure at certain checkpoints is typically intermittent, manual, and prone to human error. In order to resolve this problem, a low-power IoT asset tracking service that leverages LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) trackers offers a “timeless” and better checkpoint alternative. In particular, LoRaWAN-based trackers, as a result of their lightweight, low cost and low power, standardized infrastructure, offer the first genuinely dependable tracking alternative which enables logistics operators to minimize downtime during transportation.
Final Thoughts
In all, the future of mobile IoT location tracking technology will require a dedication to immense multi-technology development. It is necessary for us to get multi-technology cloud platforms which will smartly integrate Over-The-Top location tracking technologies – including Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, Low-Power GPS – with network-based TDoA location tracking technologies with the use of cellular and/or LoRaWAN. These innovations require great cooperation between location tracking providers and public network operators.
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