Nokia wants to make bigger IMPACT to address IoT

Following up on the rollout last June of Nokia’s Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things (IMPACT), Nokia has added new capabilities and a suite of preintegrated applications designed to allow customers to more easily create and deploy secure Internet of Things (IoT) services.

In order to ensure adoption and add value, Nokia created a number of applications that are complete end-to-end and ready to work out of the box, according to Frank Ploumen, CTO of IoT Platform and Applications at Nokia. New features address video analytics, smart parking, street lighting and a number of vehicle applications to get data in and out of vehicles securely.

In video analytics, it’s fairly easy to put cameras up, but it’s somewhat expensive to transfer the data and it’s pretty much time prohibitive to watch all of the video. Using work developed over the past several years with Bell Labs’ machine learning algorithms, Nokia developed a way to cut through the tape, so to speak.

Essentially, the system machine learns what’s normal and uses that to detect what’s abnormal; it can be applied to video feeds of traffic accidents or unauthorized entry into secure locations, for example.

“We’re looking at pixel patterns and machine learning the flow of traffic,” Ploumen told FierceWirelessTech. “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack in an automated fashion.” If you have 24 hours of video, for example, you don’t want sift through all of it, but Nokia can pinpoint the point of interest in real time.

It’s in trials now in North America. Ploumen declined to identify who’s testing it; however, the obvious venues are areas where large crowds gather, such as in a stadium or airport.

For the smart parking application, it’s a practical problem in many big cities; ultimately it calls for managing supply and demand, so Nokia’s app allows municipalities to better manage inventory, resulting in more efficient use of parking spaces and providing drivers with real-time information on parking space availability.

In the streetlighting category, a lot of cities are converting to LED lights; while they’re doing the conversion, the incremental costs to equip the streetlights with sensors is relatively low, he said. IMPACT enables cities to optimize electricity use and reduce costs through real-time inventory management, automatically detecting lighting issues and failures to help ensure maximum uptime.

Nokia has been a big proponent of Lightweight M2M (LWM2M) and Category M1 (CAT-M1) for device support but announced it also supports licensed Narrowband IoT and unlicensed LoRa networks to provide customers with additional IoT network efficiency improvements via low-power wide area networks (LPWAN).

Nokia now counts more than 100 partners in its ecosystem and is now managing some 1.5 billion devices around the world.