Science Foundation Ireland

Introducing Pervasive Nation

Pervasive Nation is the Connect Centre’s national-scale Internet-of-Things research infrastructure based on a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking technology. It is funded by Science Foundation Ireland having won a Research Infrastructures Award in January 2016.

The objective of Pervasive Nation is to build an Internet-of-Things testbed of scale which will become a resource for industry, government and academia and act as a strong catalyst for Internet-of-Things research and innovation.

The Pervasive Nation infrastructure uses the latest off-the-shelf LPWAN technologies, software-defined radio and Application Enablement Platform (AEP) technologies. These provide end-to-end connectivity allowing users to shape the future of Internet-of-Things.

Pervasive Nation is particularly suited to the connectivity and networking of small, simple devices in difficult to reach locations or in remote areas. These devices would normally require battery operation or have only small energy scavenging needs and require a low data rate.

For further information on Pervasive Nation, please contact pervasive.nation@connectcentre.ie

Pervasive Nation provides a means for the research, innovation, test and validation of the ‘future of Internet-of-Things’ at scale (tens of thousands of things per gateway) across urban and rural Ireland. LPWA has the advantage of long battery life (5 – 10 years) and wide geographical range (up to 30km).

Pervasive Nation’s Open Software Defined Architecture supports:

  • New IoT sensing & actuation technologies
  • Validation of new IoT gateways, IoT network servers and radio access technologies
  • Cyber-physical security, authentication and algorithm development for device provisioning and testing in a deployed environment
  • Virtualised, cognitive and mutualised IoT networking
  • IoT network-network integration and data exchange
  • New business model validation, including the roles of future IoT private and public network operator and service providers.

Although Pervasive Nation has been built initially from LoRa technologies it is capable of supporting multiple, different flavours of LPWA networks.

Pervasive Nation is open and extensible allowing our partners to join their own networks securely and leverage features such as scale, resilient back-end management and application enablement platform. The network will continue to scale through its extensible architecture.

The LPWA Network has several unique capabilities including the ability to quickly on-board new IoT devices and provide end-to-end IoT experimental data services.

Pervasive Nation also supports two advanced features at scale: the provision of automatic registration hooks for all devices introduced to the network and the ability to locate and track devices without the cost and energy demands of a GPS receiver. These capabilities open a whole new set of possibilities for users.

Pervasive Nation is funded as a Science Foundation Ireland Research Infrastructures Award.

CONNECT is the world leading Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications. CONNECT is funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. We engage with over 35 companies including large multinationals, SMEs and start-ups. CONNECT brings together world-class expertise from ten Irish academic institutes to create a one-stop-shop for telecommunications research, development and innovation.


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