Iocast Control Stack
The Iocast Control Stack is a Linux software package that controls an Iocast LPWA network, supporting multiple sectors, base transceivers, and inter-system roaming. It supports fixed and mobile nodes, bidirectional unicast and multicast communications, secure provisioning and management, and all node availability values. The control stack enables a wide range of applications ranging from sensors requiring a multi-year battery life to mobile alerting units requiring two-second latency.
Benefits
- Secure and reliable Land Mobile Radio (LMR) channels
- Deterministic protocol with synchronous MAC layer
- Per-node configurable latency and power consumption
- Bidirectional unicast and multicast datagrams
- 10-30 mile base transceiver coverage radius
- Node mobility and secure roaming
- Node authentication and security using shared-key encryption
- Over-the-air (“touch free”) remote node configuration
- Hundreds to millions of nodes per base transceiver
Architecture
The Iocast Control Stack installs on an RHEL 7+ or CentOS 7+ operating system, and comprises two 64-bit microservice modules: io-core and io-sector.
The io-core module provides API endpoints and maintains the node database and datagram queues. The real-time io-sector module handles the Iocast RF layers, connecting to one or more base transceivers and providing one or more sectors of coverage. The SCI interface between the two modules may be expanded into a many-to-many relationship to effect inter-system roaming. For example, if System A’s io-core makes an SCI connection to System B’s io-sector, then System A’s nodes may roam onto System B. A control stack may include one or both modules, depending on requirements.
The control stack implements three top-level TCP/IP interfaces, API, SCI, and BXI. It acts as an API server, a BXI client, and (potentially) a SCI client and server if inter-system roaming is implemented.
