C1181 Iocast Control Stack
The C1181 Iocast Control Stack is a Linux software package that controls an iocast network, including multiple application servers, sectors, and base transceivers. It supports fixed and mobile nodes, bidirectional unicast and multicast communications, secure provisioning and management, inter-system roaming, and all node availability values. The control stack enables a wide range of applications ranging from sensors requiring a multi-year battery life to alerting terminals requiring two-second latency.
An Iocast network offers significant benefits where cellular coverage is not reliable, or where NFPA-1221 or similar standards preclude use of cellular networks. Iocast can also deliver cost advantage over LTE-M where a high node density can be served by a few base transceivers, and practical advantages over NB-IOT where mobility is required.
- Ultra-reliable solution for IoT and IIoT
- Sub-second datagram delivery
- AES-128 message encryption with key management
- Active and passive standby redundancy
- Extremely low average power usage
Architecture
The C1181 Iocast Control Stack is a 64-bit Linux software distribution that includes two microservice modules, io-home and io-sector. Each instance installs on a commercial server running the CentOS 7 or RHEL 7 operating system.
The io-home 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 affect inter-system roaming. For example, if System A's io-home 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 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.
Redundancy
Two C1181 instances may be configured for active redundancy, where one instance acts as a primary controller and the other acts as a secondary controller. In this case, the primary and secondary instances run on two separate machines with an IP path between them. During normal operations, the primary instance replicates its database to the secondary instance using a log shipping protocol. Base transceivers act as voting servers, monitoring the primary instance and prompting the secondary instance to take control upon detecting a failure.
The C1181 Iocast Control Stack is available as downloadable software, with a perpetual licence based on the total number of nodes supported by the instance. The part number for the base license is CRS-C1181-NODES where NODES specifies the number of supported nodes.
An existing instance may be expanded with one or more expansion licenses. The part number for the expansion license is CRS-C1181-EXPANSION-NODES where NODES specifies the number of additional supported nodes.