Why is the Lobaro Platform mandatory for our NB-IoT Sensors & Gateways?

This question sometimes arises from integrators who run their own type of IoT platform tailored to a particular use-case and don't want an intermediate between their system and the IoT hardware to integrate. In contrast to this our platform is primary considered for device management of Lobaro and 3rd party sensors and gateways. It's meant as secure abstraction layer to the actual hardware complexity and gives the following benefits to the integrator or end-user:

• Asymmetrically encrypted data transfers, client and server certificate-based, using DTLS, while still being able to use battery life friendly UDP transfers with little overhead.
• Administration of client and server certificates.
• Remote configuration of sensors via simple APIs (HTTPS PUSH, REST, MQTT, SFTP).
• Support for Firmware Updates Over The Air (FOTA).
• Good system scalability, even with many thousands of data nodes.
• Intermediate storage for sensor data before further processing in the downstream platform.
• Simple interface independent of downstream platform with CSV export of data for simple applications.
• Integration of ChirpStack LoRaWAN network server.
• Possibility of merging sensors of different wireless technologies (e.g. NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, wireless MBUS) with a uniform API to the downstream system.
• Quickly bring IoT applications to market by focusing on the use case and the actual data without having to deal with hardware and firmware implementation details or properly secured data transfers from the sensor to the cloud.
• Usually low hardware requirements for the server on which the on-premise instance of the Lobaro Platform is installed. Often it can run in parallel on a server next to the use-case specific platform.
• Internal APIs between hardware and Lobaro Platform can be changed, e.g. for firmware extensions, without compromising a stable API to the downstream system and thus increasing the stability of the end application.

As one might see, all these functionality require a high level of knowledge about the hardware and how it internally works. Lobaro can only provide support and guarantees that all features of our NB-IoT products are available and function as expected if the Lobaro Platform is also used as a counterpart.

A direct connection to our hardware could be discussed for projects with very large numbers of hardware sold, as there is usually an adequate budget to do this. In the vast majority of cases, the manageable prices for using the Lobaro Platform as SaaS or on-premise are the economically much better option since this creates much less integration work on your side and support overhead on our side. Free trial periods of our platform are additionally available.

If using the Lobaro IoT platform is absolutely no option many of our NB-IoT products can alternatively configured to use LoRaWAN uplinks which shifts the dependence to the used LoRaWAN network server beside the well-known challenges of LoRaWAN networks compared to cellular IoT.