TaCT

Tracking and Communication Technology

Introducing TaCT

TaCT is a next generation IoT platform. A tracking and communication technology, which addresses the billions of devices requiring location, medium bandwidth, long range and a communication capability. TaCT combines a low power LoRa® network with native geo-location capability, where any IoT tag or sensor on the network can be geo-located.

Assets can be located both indoors & outdoors, across multiple floors, buildings and sites on the same network. Intelligent asset tags (i-Tags) can send and receive condition and status information via TaCT’s secure data channel.

The TaCT network uses LoRa® modulation at 2.4GHz and emulates a LoRaWAN® network. All the usual server and security features of a LoRaWAN® network are implemented in the TaCT system. Implementation at 2.4GHz removes the transmit duty cycle limitation of many systems operating in the 868/915MHz ISM band, allowing significantly more bandwidth per tag/sensor.

TaCT System Architecture & Components

Deploying a TaCT system with geo-location is easy and cost-efficient. Over-the-air updates (OTA) covers all software and hardware including Tags, Anchors and Gateways, with the TaCT control App being updated via Google Play. 

The TaCT system typically includes the following components:

TaCT

TaCT Geo Location

TaCT geo-location calculates the position of tags in the system by performing round trip time of flight (RTToF) radio exchanges between fixed position anchors and the tags. TaCT location accuracy is within 1m, 75% of the time and within 2m, 95% of the time, across both standard and advanced ranging, depending on system configuration and operating environment.

TaCT requires between four and eight anchors in a group to perform location, and the anchors should fully enclose the area of interest. Anchors are assigned to groups, and up to eight anchor groups can report through a single Gateway. Multiple gateways can be deployed, with each new gateway adding an additional eight anchor groups of capacity. To perform location of a tag, every anchor in the group performs a two-way time of flight ranging operation with the tag. The resulting times of flight are transmitted to the location server via the Gateway. Once the distance between the tag and all the anchors in the group is known, the location server calculates the location and makes a GPS coordinate position available to the User Application.

In this diagram, you can see a cluster of fixed anchors, with the Tag representing ANY number of tags, or sensors being located.

The physical distance between anchors, gateways and tags is determined mostly by the operating environment. Outdoors in line of sight, location is possible with greater than 500m between components. With a 500m effective range, large areas can be covered with small quantities of fixed infrastructure, making the system very cost efficient. Indoors the range is dependent on building construction and materials. Please contact us for an estimate, based on your particular use case.

Accuracy depends on the number of anchors with good line of sight to the tag. Placing anchors, so that four or more anchors have line of sight, will produce the best result. Many indoor location projects do not require 1-2m accuracy. For instance, locating hospital or industrial equipment only needs room level, or 4m localisation accuracy. Once in the locale, it is easy enough to find the equipment. Reducing fixed infrastructure requirements will significantly reduce installation and operation costs. The TaCT localisation algorithm has been engineered to produce good location accuracy with reduced levels of fixed infrastructure, often producing good results with only one or two fixed anchors per room.

Please contact us for a demonstration of what can be achieved. 

TaCT Geo Location Capacity

The TaCT system is capable of real-time location of a small number of tags, scheduled, or on-demand location of large numbers of tags. Mixing and matching of location methods is supported, where a small number of tags can be located in real-time, while a much larger number of tags can also be located on a scheduled or on-demand basis. Location policies are used to determine the frequency of location of every tag in the system. Location policy and radio usage has an influence on battery life. The capacities in the table below are for the minimum possible configuration of one anchor group. The capacities can be multiplied by the number of anchor groups deployed. The schedule frequency of once per hour was chosen by way of example, and the frequency can be higher or lower with a commensurate change in the number of tags located.

 

Minimum system location capacity for a single gateway deployment

PolicyCapacity (up to)Typical Battery LifeNote
Real Time60 locations per minuteWeeks-Months8 locations per minute per tag maximum
Scheduled3600 TagsMonths-YearsOne location per tag, per hour scheduled
On-Demand65000>Years 

Maximum system capacity for a single gateway deployment

PolicyCapacity (up to)Typical Battery LifeNote
Real Time480 locations per minuteWeeks-Months8 locations per minute per tag maximum
Scheduled28,800 TagsMonths-YearsOne location per tag, per hour scheduled
On-Demand65000> Years 

RANGING POWER MEASUREMENTS & BATTERY SERVICE LIFE PROJECTIONS

Integral to our location reporting system design and general thought processes, is our extensive analysis on power consumption in our tags during standby and ranging, helping us to determine the trade-offs between accuracy, location rate and power consumption / battery size. We would be happy to share this information with you via a dynamic / parametric (easy to use) spreadsheet, the output of which will provide you with an overall power estimation based on the following variables/inputs:

  • Radio network configuration when the measurements were taken.
  • Summary of analysis from our own ‘Ranging Current Measurements’ data.
  • Number of ranges used in the ranging burst.
  • Number of anchors used.
  • Ranging redundancy (Improves accuracy in low-power-advanced ranging).
  • Ranging mode. Select any of the following options: (definitions supplied on request)
    • Standard
    • Low-power-advanced
    • High-density-advanced
  • Localisations Per day – the number of times you want to request notification of the position of the tag each day.
  • Battery characteristics.

We can then quickly estimate the service life of the battery in hours, days and years. Our calculations are backed up by extensive real-World test and verification to provide a genuine prediction of system performance.

Remove the guesswork from your battery life calculations by getting in touch with us now, to analyse your own specific use cases and networks

Battery Power Consumption Charts

TaCT Location Deployment

The TaCT location software uses a unique technique for reducing the effect of multipath reception on the RTToF ranging results.  The LoRa® modulation allows the ranging signals to penetrate farther into buildings than other low power radio location systems. This combination of low power, long range and multipath reduction makes TaCT more cost effective to deploy because of the lower number of anchors required for a given area. TaCT does not require finger printing of the operating environment like BTLE and WiFi systems, so is quicker to install and does not require regular maintenance to keep the system accurate.

TaCT IoT & System Benefits

TaCT is a globally available IoT solution, operating in the 2.4GHz ISM band. TaCT has an operating range of up to a few km, with link channel bandwidths of up to 200kbps. The TaCT network is capable of coexisting with WiFi and BTLE devices sharing the same radio space, enabling new IoT, M2M, smart-home, sensor networks, and industrial automation applications. The technology allows private single, or multi-user networks to connect to multiple end applications, with either local, or remote network and application servers.

The TaCT network employs a star topology, end devices to communicate with gateways in the network. TaCT gateways act as transparent bridges, relaying messages between end-devices and a central network server, which is ideal for cloud deployment.

IoT Attributes

The TaCT IoT system uses an emulation of the LoRaWAN® stack running in the 2.4GHz ISM band. The system combines the known advantages of LoRa®, namely, long range, low power and robust signalling, with much higher data throughput and a native ranging and location technology. The data rate is similar to Zigbee with longer range. The table summarises the key attributes of popular IoT technologies.

TaCTZigbeeBTLENB-IoTLoRa® 868/915
Data Range200kbps250kbps2mbps140kbps11kbps
Range (LoS)300m-2km100m100m22km14km
Carrier ChargesNNNY**N
Native Location1-3mNBeacons50m100m
VoiceY (up to 300m)NY (2-10m)NN

**pricing for NB-IoT sim varies considerably by country, provider and data plan. It may be necessary to switch provider during the lifetime of the product to control costs.

TaCT Evaluation Kit

The TaCT evaluation kit is quick and easy to install, and includes everything required for you to make an evaluation of the TaCT platform. The evaluation kit includes the software for the join, network and applications server running in the cloud, a TaCT gateway, eight TaCT anchors and a variety of (up to 4) tag combinations.