Creating smart city solutions one extension at a time with First Snow
Project Summary
Due to Korea's highly developed connectivity environment, the IoT market has been mainly flooded with solutions from a few large telecom companies such as LTE-M and NB-IoT of SKT/KT/LGU+. In this high-cost, closed-type telecom network structure, First Snow was able to evaluate the value of LoRaWAN as an IoT communication infrastructure more suitable for small and medium-sized cities, especially the urban-rural combination of environments.
Company Profile
First Snow is an IoT solution provider focusing on the Smart City market (Public/Public Enterprise) through implementing the local government's private LoRaWAN network capabilities in solutions for the people. The company’s services include planning public service applications and hardware products, technology-based consulting, and experience in building a network communication infrastructure for implementing excellent Smart City services. Project planning, system development and implementation, and post-care and maintenance, are the three branches of First Snow's expertise in developing IoT solutions for the Korean market.
The Challenge
Creating smart city solutions is hard because those solutions are complex and have a lot of variables. When wanting to create a comprehensive platform and use it for specific applications, you first need to start by deploying the network that needs to be such as to accommodate all or at least most of the eventual use cases. At the same time, it needs to correspond with the local legal restrictions and regulations that may vary by country or even region.
To receive the approval and access to build and/or use government networks, specific security measures must be met before the company can even think to start developing a product.
Combining the products and the network in such a way is the real challenge. The goal is to build a two-pillar smart city solution:
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Building a communication infrastructure
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Network integration
- LoRaWAN and TVWS (TV White Space)
- Wired/wireless network
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Remote end device and а terminal system
- Intelligent operating management system for out-door CCTV enclosure
- Smart pole
- Village crime prevention - CCTV monitoring system
- Wireless AP (Wi-Fi)
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Security/Server system
- Network linkage system
- Security Systems such as firewall
- Virtualization server
- Access control system
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Integrated control system
- Integrated control solution
- Intelligent CCTV
- Intelligent screening control system
- Password management solution
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Network integration
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System implementation of Smart City (safety)
- Smart City Integrated Platform
- Smoke/flame/heat sensing system
- Local bus information system
- Socially disadvantaged (traffic) protection system
- Traffic protection system
- Water supply quality (environmental) monitoring system
- Smart pedestrian crossing system
- Smart streetlight (pole) system
- Environmental monitoring system
- Safety map system
- EMS system
- Village crime prevention system
RAK Products Used
The Solution
First Eye V2.0 is a notable product. This intelligent enclosure-cased operating management system consists of the on-site “probe” that is equipped with an environmental sensor, a power switch, digital door lock, F/E, G/E (Fiber Optic), RFID module, and is packaged as a whole with remote management software, centralized GIS web service software, and a mobile App. Its purpose is to perform efficient monitoring of the environment and provide an agile response to troubleshooting or status events. In its hardware casing, First Eye is an external small cabinet-type facility with a specific standard for protecting, storage, and internal mounting, with some terminal devices that perform electricity, communication, and security functions in various outdoor facilities such as CCTV or traffic signal controllers.
Even though First Eye is not a LoRaWAN solution itself, it is still a big part of the smart city infrastructure. In their efforts in building a better urban environment for everyone, First Snow has developed a number of solutions that utilize LoRaWAN connectivity to tackle different aspects of everyday life like:
- BIT service for small/medium, urban/rural types of cities - High-quality smart bus information service.
- Fire detection/alarm monitoring service – 24/7 fire safety supervision.
- Water supply remote advanced metering service - Improving the operational efficiency of local government’s efforts in water supply control.
- Crime prevention CCTV monitoring system - Monitoring service for “Village Crime Prevention CCTV” that was separated from the Control Center.
- Electric-powered assistive devices (electric wheelchair) - Safety management service for the elderly, provide services that protect the socially disadvantaged.
But none of this will be possible and work properly without a reliable network infrastructure, consisting of many gateways. First Snow started evaluating the possibilities in the sector with WisGate Edge Max gateways that are durable and with the rich technical documentation available, are a great starter for such a deployment.
To meet Korea’s high standards, something extra is needed. This is why First Snow is switching to WisGate Edge Pro V2 to continue offering and upgrading their smart city solutions. With its white label option, it is the perfect addition to any brand but the biggest advantage here is the new and improved WisGateOS 2, in, particular – the Extensions feature that the operating system supports.
The extensions functionality of WisGateOS 2 provides additional features and functions that can be added or removed, based on the user's needs. This collection of custom plugins and add-ons enriches the gateway’s functionality with options that are not provided out of the box. Later this year RAKwireless will provide the option for our users to build their own extensions.
But for now, the extensions are created by RAKwireless following the clients’ needs. In this particular case, for the client (First Snow) to be able to connect securely to the government network a specific VPN service was a requirement. And RAKwireless delivered – the DCUBE VPN extension – a secure connection add-on for the WisGate Edge Pro V2 to correspond with the demanding Korean market.
“In particular, RAK's stable LoRaWAN gateway has been a great help to our business, and we also have great expectations for the development of various sensors and convergence terminal devices through WisBlock in the near future.” says the representative of First Snow to our team.
Outcome
As IoT becomes more popular and widely used, edge processing is becoming more diverse as well. Facing the fragmented market demand, different enterprise users have different needs in building the gateway network infrastructure for their solutions. To meet such diverse needs and solutions in a condensed and universal form combined with the interests of the enterprise as well as to meet various market demands under the limited resources of the standard gateway becomes the heart of the solution itself.
With this consideration, the scalability of the network and the convenience of third-party integration have become the core competitiveness of the gateway as a product. The smart solution is to combine the custom needs for the specific use case and user with the unified and user-friendly interface by integrating third-party owned software and custom in-house-made extensions, and support users to carry out secondary development.
Due to the previous limitations of the hardware platform of the standard LoRaWAN gateway, a large number of functions urgently needed by users couldn’t be quickly deployed on the gateway, which has created a bottleneck for the large-scale application of solutions.
The intelligent operating system of WisGateOS 2 and enhanced hardware of the new gateways, support the installation and management of those so-needed extension plug-ins. Users can develop their own plug-ins or reach out to RAKwireless to help them with that (like First Snow did) and integrate them with the gateway OS, which brings convenience and versatility.
Extensions change the way of handling customization. No additional firmware or hardware enhancements are needed to carry on a customer’s demand, no additional consumption of system resources and flexibility in later maintenance, production, and release are the benefits of introducing extensions to your solution.
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