Runtime Enables LoRaWAN Deployments; Joins LoRa Alliance

Large Scale Device Management Critical for Fleets, Metering, Agriculture & Environment, Healthcare

Runtime, an IoT cloud platform and open source solution provider, announced its official membership in the LoRa Alliance, the global association of over 500 companies backing the LoRaWAN standard for low-power, long-range, wide-area networks. Runtime also announced its commercial support for the latest release of Apache Mynewt 1.2, which includes integrated LoRaWAN connectivity, giving developers more connectivity options when deploying both Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and consumer Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

“The IIoT alone will add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by the year 2030,” said Runtime CEO and Co-Founder, James Pace. “The critical pieces are coming together to enable very large scale deployments that include the distribution of millions of sensors. LoRaWAN offers a low-cost connectivity choice that enables massive scale deployments; designing connected devices using a foundational open source project such as Apache Mynewt provides IoT companies with a tested open source platform for developing connected sensors.”

Apache Mynewt is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) open source project that provides a complete OS for securely managing connected devices that cannot run Linux or Android (i.e., MCU-class devices). Apache Mynewt 1.2 includes:

  • A highly efficient implementation of LoRaWAN v1.0.2;
  • The world’s most complete implementation of Bluetooth 5;
  • Bluetooth mesh, including provisioning client, GATT proxy, and foundation models.

“Open low power wireless standards are critical in driving the deployment of large scale IoT networks. At Runtime, we commercially support an open source Bluetooth stack because we believe in the Bluetooth SIG’s 30,000 member ecosystem and their approach to developing interoperable solutions,” said Runtime CTO, and Co-Founder, Sterling Hughes. “We believe LoRaWAN can have a similar impact in the long range connectivity space, providing inexpensive, ubiquitous backhaul for industrial Bluetooth and Bluetooth Mesh sensor networks.”

Apache Mynewt is the world’s first software solution that enables simultaneous operation of both Bluetooth Low Energy and LoRaWAN on a single processor. This enables sensor and solution providers to provide local access via Bluetooth LE, or Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh, and long-range connectivity using LoRaWAN. The end-to-end, open solution for developers was tested using the EE-02 and EE-04 open hardware reference boards from Telenor Digital. This open hardware solution leverages the Semtech SX1276 transceiver coupled with a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52, functioning as both a host processor and Bluetooth host+controller. Working with experts at Runtime, organizations can deploy this open hardware, software, and network platform to effectively and efficiently manage the millions of devices implemented around a city, a fleet, a farm, or globally to improve lives, save money, increase revenue, and much more.

“With everyone scrambling to make sense of the IoT, development of firmware for small devices is no longer the domain of a small number of specialists. Platforms and toolchains fit for the embedded market are not always a good fit for the new audience of developers experimenting with embedded devices,” explained Bjørn Borud, Vice President and Head of Exploratory Engineering at Telenor Digital. “We at Exploratory Engineering at Telenor chose to work with Apache Mynewt because we think it is important to support an open source platform that is being developed by people who are, and who understand, developers. We also chose Apache Mynewt because the project has been showing good pace and is rapidly maturing.”

Telenor Group is one of the world’s major mobile operators, keeping customers connected in 13 markets across Scandinavia, Central Eastern Europe, and Asia.

Today, hundreds of thousands of devices are running Apache Mynewt, a modular real-time operating system for MCU-class connected devices that operate for long durations under power, memory, and storage constraints. Enabling a variety of embedded devices, such as sensors, meters, wearables, light bulbs, locks, actuators, and others, Apache Mynewt addresses these constraints in a hardware-agnostic way. This flexibility gives developers the ability to use a variety of microcontrollers (ARM, MIPS, RISC V) and sensors, and choose from many of today’s popular IoT communication standards (e.g., Bluetooth 5, BLE 4.2, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN), without being tied to a single vendor or re-factoring architectures.