Low Power Wide Area Networks: An Overview

Abstract

Abstract-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 lowpower 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.

Smart Building Management Systems and Internet of Things

“…Since the 90s, two majors Wide-Area Networks (WAN) [6,7] have appeared and have been massively deployed: GSM and the Internet. As a result, a single BTM system is required to manage building separated by kilometers or more.…”

SC-FDMA with index modulation for M2M and IoT uplink applications

“…Low power wide area (LPWA) [1] technologies have been designed to meet the requirements of M2M and IoT applications in terms of low energy consumption and wide coverage. Unlike traditional cellular technologies, LPWA offers sets of features to low power devices at the expense of low data rates.…”

“…The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) 1 enters the M2M and IoT market through the recent proposition of LTE Category M (LTE-M) [2] (also known as enhanced machinetype communications (eMTC)) and Narrow Band-IoT (NBIoT) [3] standards in Release-13. In addition to improving the range, reducing the complexity, and the cost of the devices, these cellular solutions adopt two saving power modes in order to prolong the battery lifetime of the devices.…”

“…IM technique consists of selecting a set of sub-carriers for each symbol, the selected sub-carriers will carry on the input data symbols while the rest of the sub-carriers is turned 1 More details on http://www.3gpp.org/.…”

Latency Efficient Request Access Rate for Congestion Reduction in LTE MTC

“…Moreover, a similar modeling has been proposed in [8] for LTE MTC. In [4], this modeling is 1 Herein, we use the term device to refer to User Equipment (UEs).…”