Implementing M2M communications to better manage logistics

The machine to machine (M2M) technology sector is growing quickly and the need for reliable communications has proven to be vital. Some of the biggest growth areas are agriculture and logistics.

In agriculture, information is needed from many sensors on times to feed, water, spray or harvest a crop. Indeed, M2M technology is even making it possible to detect when an animal has injured itself (gait analysis) or has been milked too recently - therefore automating and optimising many of the processes on a farm to cut costs and increase yields.

In logistics, the ability to know where trucks are, if they've broken down and if they've made a delivery enables entire fleets to be optimised and adapt to changing circumstances in real time with little human intervention.

And Lime's field programmable RF transceivers are being adopted here too. It's early days but a prototype system that is able to determine a truck's GPS location / status and broadcast this back to the logistics command centre has been developed by one of our customers.

The Lime LMS6002D chip enables the transmission of data using any available infrastructure and is able to work on any mobile 3G and 4G data network standard - including WCDMA, HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX - and any mobile communications frequency between 0.3 and 3.8GHz.