What is Performance Optimisation?
Businesses that rely on essential machines to function, like wind turbines or solar panels, need to ensure they are getting the best out of them, all of the time. The performance of these machines directly contributes to the bottom line, so knowing whether or not the equipment is performing at it’s best can have an impact financially as well as operationally.
IoT can ensure equipment is performing at peak optimisation, performance and quality by detecting inefficiencies and bottlenecks, enabling managers to make important decisions to increase operational efficiency and overall profits. For example by amalgamating the data that comes from sensors on panels at a solar farm, managers can spot anomalies such as panels or units that are under-performing, and even the reasons why, such as temperature, dust, or extreme weather conditions. Managers can then make smart changes, like moving units, increasing the volume of cleaning, or making changes in insulation or alignment. IoT allows business managers to collect reliable and critical real-time data and transform it into useful insights.
The growth of Performance Optimisation
IoT can allow businesses to monitor revenue generating assets at a much more granular level, giving them a better understanding of where adjustments need to be made. Deep visibility can allow companies to decrease the stress on their equipment, rebalance workloads, and receive alerts ahead of time to issues such as overheating.
Effective maintenance and equipment handling are key to performance optimisation. To determine root causes and plan solutions, operators must first be able to accurately and consistently monitor existing bottlenecks; and IoT is the most powerful tool to do just that.
IoT can also enable the creation of complex business logic that can take action based on a predefined set of rules. In regulated industries, such as oil and gas, it’s also easy to see which assets are out of compliance.
The role of cellular connectivity in Performance Optimisation
Global network coverage
For global IoT deployments, cellular connectivity is widely considered the most logical and reliable connection option. There is no need to build new infrastructure nor add additional network gateways to support remote deployments. Connectivity is via the cell towers that are already in place. This already tried and tested infrastructure, also provides the added benefit of cellular roaming. For solutions that may either be deployed to an unknown spot in the world or move frequently between regions, a cellular provider with multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) would be a sensible option.
Low Power Wide Area Network
As the title implies, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies use very low power to provide long-range cellular connectivity. LPWAN technologies use a small portion of the mature and reliable LTE bandwidth to provide connectivity that’s ideally suited to devices that rely on battery technology to function.
Historically, a significant limitation for cellular adoption has been power consumption and battery life (or lack of!). LPWAN protocols like LTE-M and NB-IoT make it possible for cellular IoT modules to not only save power when not in use, but to also transmit relatively small amounts of data with minimal power usage.
Both LTE-M and NB-IoT are designed to offer years of operation from a battery-driven power source. Since data throughput is limited (but often more than enough for relaying sensor data), simpler signal modulation schemes and less complex radio modems are needed, leading to diminished power requirements. Advances in wake/sleep modes on modern hardware only contribute to these benefits.
Security
Cyber security risks are a reality. It is essential to keep the gateway secure and create private connections to the cloud. On-SIM technology and mobile core network services, resolves IoT device identity issues, enables dynamic scalability and provides defence against spoofing of IoT devices, ransomware events and unauthorised device access to network and cloud services. Since cellular networks use SIM cards for authentication, it’s exceedingly difficult to spoof the identity of a device. SIMs can be pre-provisioned to securely communicate with Cloud Services. Compare this to Wi-Fi: When connected to a public Wi-Fi network, devices are sharing the connection with all other devices on the network. If any individual device has a security concern, all devices are at-risk. Cellular keeps every device separate from every other device, ensuring the security of the data being transmitted.
Your next step…
Talk to our IoT specialists team about your connectivity needs.
Call us on 0330 056 3300