People-Powered Networks.
Light Hotspots status: January, 2022
What is a Light Hotspot?
Light Hotspots are the evolution of how LoRaWAN gateways will interact with the Helium blockchain. Since the genesis block, the Helium blockchain has run entirely on the physical Hotspot itself. As the blockchain network grows, each Hotspot running a full node undergoes increasing load and are starting to fall out of sync due to the higher compute requirements.
To mitigate this, the Hotspot’s consensus work has been moved off of physical Hotspots and onto Validators as of July 8, 2021. This simplifies the architecture and enables us to grow the Network exponentially while keeping blocktimes and epochs stable.
As all approved Hotspots transition to a Light Hotspot architecture, we also introduce a new type of Hotspot known as Data Only Hotspots, activated as of July 20, 2021, to satisfy the increasing demand and continue to expand network coverage.
| 1 | Weekly status: January, 2022 | HQ location | HIP19 Application Received | DeWi KYC/B | Regulatory Certification Complete |
| 2 | Smart Harvest | Canada | TRUE | TRUE | FCC/ISED PENDING |
| 3 | SEEED/ SenseCAP | China | TRUE | TRUE | CE/FCC PENDING |
| 4 | Tektelic Light Gateway | Canada | TRUE | TRUE | CE/FCC pending (Jan. 2022) |
| 5 | Nebra Light | TRUE | TRUE | FCC, CE, UKCA, IC / ISED, MIC, SRRC, WPC, RCM, EAC PENDING | |
| 6 | Dragino Light Hotspot | China | TRUE | TRUE | CE/FCC/TELEC ALL PENDING |
| 7 | Polyhex – BoHM A | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 8 | Polyhex – BoHM B (alt security) | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 9 | HeNet B.V. / LongAP | Netherlands | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 10 | Browan Light Hotspot | Taiwan | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 11 | Bobcat/ EasyLinkin alt security implementation, Light Hotspot | China | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 12 | Miromico AG | Switzerland | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 13 | Systems4U | Portugal | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 14 | HeNet B.V. / LongAP (alt security) | Netherlands | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE |
| 15 | OxTech (indoor) | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 16 | Midas | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 17 | omSquare – Light | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 18 | Kerlink – Light | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 19 | Pisces – Light (Indoor) | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 20 | EDA Technology – Light | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 21 | COTX – Light Hotspot | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 22 | OPTION – Light (Indoor/Outdoor) | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 23 | RisingHF – RHF2S027 (Light/Indoor) | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | |
| 24 | Chengdu Glacier Cloud Storage Technology – Light | TRUE | FALSE | FALSE | |
| 25 | CALDIGIT | TRUE | FALSE | FALSE |
The official GitHub Helium Status Tracker:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pOmrMV_oiF0FtR1NOX_pqykKOBsb_QghiNkTlF644DU/edit#gid=1880339342
Status key
- Draft: HIP is in process of being written; author is not yet soliciting feedback from the community at large
- In Discussion: HIP is under active consideration by the community
- Approved: HIP has been approved by rough consensus, and pending development and testing
- Deployed: Code to implement HIP has been merged and deployed to the network
- Closed: HIP abandoned, rendered obsolete by other changes, or otherwise withdrawn by the author
Architecture
Light Hotspot Properties
When the Light Hotspot Client is fully developed and in production (which will happen with the completion of Milestone 4 detailed below) they will satisfy the following properties:
- A Hotspot on the Helium network that, via Validators, can participate in PoC beacons and witnesses, and forwards data packets;
- Does not store a copy of the Blockchain, eliminating synchronization;
- Does not create challenges (relies on Validators to create challenges on their behalf);
- Does not participate in Consensus Groups (relies on Validators for block production);
- Will no longer depend on libp2p or “gossip”, and instead use gRPC, a new framework to communicate between distributed systems;
- Will be eligible to earn $HNT (see table below)
In other words, the client will allow the Hotspot to participate as a Full Hotspot, without the extra overhead of maintaining a local copy of the blockchain.
