Amsterdam-based Ingy has confirmed it is using wireless mesh protocol Wirepas as the foundational technology for its smart lighting offer, and the key component to scale smart lighting for hundreds of thousands of nodes in single networks buildings, including in offices, warehouses, hospitals, and industrial plants.
The firm reckons rival mesh networking technologies, including Bluetooth and Zigbee, which have underpinned most smart lighting installations in buildings, struggle to scale much beyond 500 nodes. This is insufficient, it said; 10,000 nodes is a minimum requirement for large enterprises seeking to leverage smart lighting.
Ingy has been working with Wirepas, based in Finland, for 18 months; so far, it has kept the indentity of its wireless mesh technology under warps, as it has developed the software and hardware stack on top of it. Ingy claims a modular plug-and-play smart lighting system that can be deployed in weeks.
Ingy provides software and hardware components, alongside tooling and integrations, it said. It has a range of ‘beyond-lighting’ applications that can be supported from the luminaire itself, using Wirepas-based mesh. These include asset tracking, indoor navigation, occupancy analytics, climate monitoring and others.
The system integrates with smart building platforms from the likes of Planon, Spacewell, Ultimo, GOOEE, Systematic and Skyspark. Ingy is seeking to engage with lighting and sensor manufacturers; its software stack is available for licensing and white-labelling, so third parties can launch their own solutions.
Bastiaan de Groot, chief executive at Ingy, said: “Utilising Wirepas… [gives] us an enormous competitive advantage. We see many of our competitors struggling to get their wireless mesh to the scale that is required to have their lighting operate as the backbone of their smart building, which typically requires a mesh network with over 10,000 nodes… This is never an issue for us.”
Teppo Hemiä, chief executive at Wirepas, commented: “We both embrace an open architecture with an ecosystem play and have a clear focus on respective parts in the overall IoT stack for lighting and beyond. We recognized one key step for many players in the lighting space was to create their own lighting application. With Ingy, the market has a strong end-to-end offering that enables any lighting company to hit the ground running.”
At the end of last year, Ingy and partner BINX Smartility said they had supplied smart lighting for “the smartest school of the Netherlands”, in the form of Zone.college, with 1.300 Koopman Interlight luminaires forming a fully distributed wireless network. The school is to deploy asset tracking, indoor navigation, occupancy analytics, and call buttons, off the same network.
Wirepas-based mesh networks provide a single horizontal connectivity technology, designed for massive-scale IoT connections. All meshed devices function as routers for other devices. The company behind the company says: “The self-healing network is optimized by local decision-making to reach unlimited scalability, coverage and density whilst using the available radio spectrum as efficiently as possible.”
