A Comparative Survey Study on LPWA Networks : LoRa and NB-IoT

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2018

The rapid growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the current decade has led to the development of a multitude of new access technologies targeted at low-power, wide area networks (LP-WANs). However, this has also created another challenge pertaining to technology selection. This paper reviews the performance of LP-WAN technologies for IoT, including design choices and their implications. We consider Sigfox, LoRaWAN, WavIoT, random phase multiple access (RPMA), narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) as well as LTE-M and assess their performance in terms of signal propagation, coverage and energy conservation. The comparative analyses presented in this paper are based on available data sheets and simulation results. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to evaluate network performance in response to variations in system design parameters. Results show that each of RPMA, NB-IoT and LTE-M incurs at least 9 dB additional path loss relative to Sigfox and LoRaWAN. This study further reveals that with a 10% improvement in receiver sensitivity, NB-IoT 882 MHz and LoRaWAN can increase coverage by up to 398% and 142% respectively, without adverse effects on the energy requirements. Finally, extreme weather conditions can significantly reduce the active network life of LP-WANs. In particular, the results indicate that operating an IoT device in a temperature of-20 • C can shorten its life by about half; 53% (WavIoT, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, RPMA) and 48% in LTE-M compared with environmental temperature of 40 • C.

The main issues faced by the low power communication standards are its inability to communicate over a fairly long distance. This paper focuses on a fairly new connectivity protocol known as the LoRa which is gaining importance in the world of IoT for its capability to communicate over a long range while exploiting the low power advantages of the conventional LPWAN(Low Power Wide Area Network) protocol. We have discussed the LoRa standard here along with its advantages over other protocols like Zigbee, Bluetooth, Z-wave which till now are reigning the low power wireless connectivity domain.

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Internet of Things, 2018

Internet of things (IoT) has become a pervasive technology with ubiquitous presence in the modern digital ecosystem. Several types of IoT are available in the recent years based on their features and applications. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one of the 3GPP standardized solutions for massive machine type communications (mMTC). It is designed for the large scale mMTC to provide coverage over a large area. Therefore, NBIoT is one of the most attractive low power wide area (LPWA) technologies. It is preferred for the large scale deployments in the large projects such as smart farming, healthcare, smart cities and smart grids. However, it is also suitable for low power domestic applications such as smart home and pets' tracking. The LPWA features of NBIoT make it the primary choice for several emerging applications such as healthcare, agriculture, utility management, tracking of objects, smart city monitoring, retail management, smart grid monitoring, and industry applications. In this article we provide the principles and applications of NBIoT for the large scale deployments.

New Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as Long Range (LoRa) are emerging which enable power efficient wireless communication over very long distances. Devices typically communicate directly to a sink node which removes the need of constructing and maintaining a complex multi-hop network. Given the fact that a wide area is covered and that all devices communicate directly to a few sink nodes a large number of nodes have to share the communication medium. LoRa provides for this reason a range of communication options (centre frequency, spreading factor , bandwidth, coding rates) from which a transmitter can choose. Many combination settings are orthogonal and provide simultaneous collision free communications. Nevertheless , there is a limit regarding the number of transmitters a LoRa system can support. In this paper we investigate the capacity limits of LoRa networks. Using experiments we develop models describing LoRa communication behaviour. We use these models to parameterise a LoRa simulation to study scalability. Our experiments show that a typical smart city deployment can support 120 nodes per 3.8 ha, which is not sufficient for future IoT deployments. LoRa networks can scale quite well, however, if they use dynamic communication parameter selection and/or multiple sinks.

DCCN, 2019

Expected communication scenarios within the emerging landscape of Internet of Things (IoT) bring the growth of smart devices connected in the communication network. The communication technologies of greatest interest for IoT are known as Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs). Today, there are LPWA technologies (Sigfox, Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT)) capable to provide energy efficient communication as well as extended communication coverage. This paper provides an analysis of LPWA technologies and describes experimental evaluation of LoRaWAN technology in real conditions. The LoRaWAN technology provides over 150 dB Maximum Coupling Loss (MCL), which together with maximum transmission power (TX) 14 dBm and spreading factor 7 results in theoretical communication distance in units of kilometers. The obtained results from field-deployment in the city of Brno, Czech Republic confirm the initial expectations as it was possible to establish reliable communication between low-end LoRaWAN device and LoRaWAN gateway on the distance up to 6 km.

Sensors, 2018

LoRaWAN is one of the low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies that have received significant attention by the research community in the recent years. It offers low-power, low-data rate communication over a wide range of covered area. In the past years, the number of publications regarding LoRa and LoRaWAN has grown tremendously. This paper provides an overview of research work that has been published from 2015 to September 2018 and that is accessible via Google Scholar and IEEE Explore databases. First, a detailed description of the technology is given, including existing security and reliability mechanisms. This literature overview is structured by categorizing papers according to the following topics: (i) physical layer aspects; (ii) network layer aspects; (iii) possible improvements; and (iv) extensions to the standard. Finally, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis is presented along with the challenges that LoRa and LoRaWAN still face.

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are attracting a lot of attention primarily because of their ability to offer affordable connectivity to the low-power devices distributed over very large geographical areas. In realizing the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT), LPWA technologies complement and sometimes supersede the conventional cellular and short range wireless technologies in performance for various emerging smart city and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. This review paper presents the design goals and the techniques, which different LPWA technologies exploit to offer wide-area coverage to low-power devices at the expense of low data rates. We survey several emerging LPWA technologies and the standardization activities carried out by different standards development organizations (e.g., IEEE, IETF, 3GPP, ETSI) as well as the industrial consortia built around individual LPWA technologies (e.g., LORa Alliance,WEIGHTLESS-SIG, and DASH7 Alliance). We further note that LPWA technologies adopt similar approaches, thus sharing similar limitations and challenges. This paper expands on these research challenges and identifies potential directions to address them. While the proprietary LPWA technologies are already hitting the market with large nationwide roll-outs, this paper encourages an active engagement of the research community in solving problems that will shape the connectivity of tens of billions of devices in the next decade.

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are making spectacular progress from design, standardisation, to commercialisation. At this time of fast-paced adoption, it is of utmost importance to analyse how well these technologies will scale as the number of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) inevitably grows. In this letter, we provide a stochastic geometry framework for modelling the performance of a single gateway LoRa network, a leading LPWA technology. Our analysis formulates unique peculiarities of LoRa, including its chirp spread-spectrum modulation technique, regulatory limitations on radio duty cycle, and use of ALOHA protocol on top, all of which are not as common in today's commercial cellular networks. We show that the coverage probability drops exponentially as the number of end-devices grows due to interfering signals using the same spreading sequence. We conclude that this fundamental limiting factor is perhaps more significant towards LoRa scalability than for instance spectrum restrictions. Our derivations for co-spreading factor interference found in LoRa networks enables rigorous scalability analysis of such networks.

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

LoRa is a low power long range wireless communication platform that is designed as an efficient communication platform for small, low powered devices. This makes it very suitable for battery powered devices and IoT implementation. This paper evaluates some low cost LoRa modules available on the market and their suitability, energy efficiency and performance during operation. Two low cost LoRa transceiver from Semtech Industries, the SX1272 and SX1278 were tested for their power consumption and maximum transmission range. This study have evaluated the two LoRa solutions and found that the SX1278 have a better transmission range and uses lower energy compared to the SX1272 thus making it more suitable for embedded implementation as a data gateway.

International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT), 2018

— Internet of Things (IoT) marketplace is swiftly expanding as companies across multiple vertical industries recognize the need for connectivity and the potential transformation enabled through connectivity. In short, the Internet of Things refers to the rapidly growing network of connected objects that are able to collect and exchange data using embedded sensors. NB-IOT (Narrowband-Internet of Things), LoRa, and Sigfox wireless technologies have been getting a good deal of attention globally as the market for wireless matures in light of the prospects for billions of connections. The goal of the LoRa Alliance, LoRaWAN adopters, and SigFox is that mobile network operators adopt their technology for IoT deployments over both city and nationwide low power, wide-area networks (LPWANs). But there are some prominent differences between how each technology plans to achieve this goal and which applications the technology is best suited for.