Overview
The Cisco IXM gateway is a carrier-grade, ruggedized product, specifically designed for harsh outdoor deployments, and also suitable for indoor applications. It adheres to the gateway hardware reference design, offers uplink channels, and provides geolocation capabilities through Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) and Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) techniques.
  • Geolocation capability
  • Enhanced spectrum utilization
  • Frequency channel diversity
  • Ability to deploy omnidirectional and sectorized cells
Geolocation capability The Cisco IXM gateway is equipped with hardware support for precise timestamping and high-accuracy GPS/GNSS for geolocation applications. Customers can take advantage of this capability to approximate the position of endpoints, yet without requiring GPS/GNSS to be present in the endpoints themselves. This dramatically reduces the power consumption. It is particularly well-suited for geofencing (presence) and coarse asset tracking use cases. Enhanced spectrum utilization The Cisco IXM gateway features LoRa baseband subsystems, allowing it to support uplink channels and thus receive a few data packets concurrently. This design improves the radio spectrum utilization and thereby increases the overall system capacity. Frequency channel diversity The Cisco IXM gateway supports software-configurable frequency channel diversity. Frequency channel diversity effectively aids in the propagation of the wireless signal from endpoints to the gateway, especially in multipath environments and for geolocation applications. Ability to deploy omnidirectional and sectorized cells The Cisco IXM gateway allows to achieve both omnidirectional and sectorized (directional) propagation patterns. Omnidirectional cells are simply established through the usage of an omnidirectional antenna with a single gateway unit, while tri-sector cells can consist of a few gateways with a 120-degree sector antenna per each unit. Sectorization is useful for high-density deployments as it effectively increases the capacity of the cell.