Cheetah Networks was one of the early collaborators to have its technology incorporated into Ottawa’s Area X.0 (formerly called “L5”) smart-city network. Engaging on the ground floor when the environment first launched in May 2019 gave us early access to North America’s first integrated test environment.
This included access to a variety of IoT use cases, including smart city and connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV). Now a year later, through collaboration with many Ottawa high-tech companies, Area X.0 encompasses a wide and growing range of applications (e.g. smart agriculture)and network technologies, including LTE, 5G (mmWave 5G), LoRa, Wi-Fi, TV whitespace and Satellite.
The environment and its ecosystem partners have accelerated the commercialization of our actionable real-time IoT network analytics. The Cheetah Networks PulseView™ Solution has benefited from access to the diverse capabilities and new test cases available at Area X.0. The environment provides a dynamic mix of public and private technologies that simulates the environments of our enterprise, government, and industrial clients, which build their private IoT/IIoT networks on top of public network services.
As one of Area X.0’s network assurance solutions, PulseView™ has been active around the clock for over a year: analyzing and monitoring, in real-time, the Quality of Experience (QoE) across a number of technologies and emulating variety of applications. It has also been an incredible opportunity to test and develop our solution within an outdoor network environment that is diverse, complex, and rugged (have you been to Ottawa, Canada in the Winter?!).
The applications being tested in the environment require a reliable and dependable combination of private and public networks. Through the experience, we have evolved our analytics capability to encompass the performance of LTE, Ethernet, LoRa, Wi-Fi, and other network technologies.
Equally important for Cheetah Networks is the exposure to a diverse set of IoT applications that operate on the Area X.0 network. These include instrumented intersections with cameras, pedestrian–detect sensors, CAVs, drones, and smart agriculture—with more being added all the time.
Area X.0 is representative of networks that are more vital to city operations than ever before—networks that carry sensors, machines, and human-generated data. At the site, our PulseView™ Solution watches over, in real-time, the entire smart-city network. It then correlates and distills the information on a single pane of glass, revealing the Quality of Experience (QoE) that people, machines, and applications on the network are experiencing.
PulseView™ leverages machine learning and AI to gather real-time information from multiple network elements, zones, layers, and applications. It provide a holistic view of what is happening in the moment, as well as helping to predict what is about to happen. This allows for rapid course correction in the network operations centre, ensuring that all connected assets can perform as intended.
As Kelly Daize, Director of Area X.0 at Invest Ottawa, says, “Cheetah Networks PulseView™ Solution is always on, providing continuous yet lightweight monitoring from end-use applications through to our private cloud. The solution has identified a number of networks issues from configuration to performance to third party service issues and we trust them to isolate our issues quickly and effectively. The real-time analytics that PulseView™ provides enables timely and focused trouble-shooting, rapid resolution, and the safe continuation of essential services.”
Smart cities, the industrial sector, and enterprises are increasingly relying on private and public networks. To assure the reliability and performance of these heterogenous and critical infrastructures, actionable, real-time IoT network analytics are necessary. The PulseView™ Solution is designed to meet this need, and the opportunity at Area X.0 is invaluable to test and further develop its capabilities and features.
Learn about Area X.0 (video)