With the increasing success of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry and the consequent conception of new IoT applications, a significant variety of network design challenges has been unfolded. As a consequence, different Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technologies have been developed and marketed to address each specific application need. Among them, the Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) was developed to target reliable communications over the licensed spectrum, while the Long Range (LoRa) was conceived as a loss-tolerant means over unlicensed frequencies. Recently, satellite LPWAN appeared as a new connectivity option and an affordable solution, particularly suitable for remote and not easily accessible areas. This book chapter timely addresses the opportunities and challenges of such satellite LPWAN architecture by providing a general framework for the evaluation of its performances. The chapter also describes a methodological approach for designing the network, selecting the configuration parameters and the traffic patterns, fitting the best trade-off among reliability, latency, throughput, and energy efficiency.
IntroductionLow Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is becoming a revolutionary technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its low power consumption, long distance coverage, and low cost of the devices [19]. Many LPWAN technologies have been