Understanding the Limits of LoRaWAN

Abstract

Low-Power Wide Area Networking (LPWAN) technology offers long-range communication, which enables new types of services. Several solutions exist; LoRaWAN is arguable the most adopted. It promises ubiquitous connectivity in outdoor IoT applications, while keeping network structures, and management, simple. This technology has received a lot of attention in recent months from network operators and solution providers. Yet, the technology has limitations that need to be clearly understood to avoid inflated expectations and disillusionment. This article provides an impartial and fair overview of what the capabilities and the limitations of LoRaWAN are. We discuss those in the context of use cases, and list open research and development questions.

Interference Impact on Coverage and Capacity for Low Power Wide Area IoT Networks

“…There are only a few papers available, and while they provide insight in the individual technologies they do not analyze the impact from external interference sources. Examples include the analysis of the basic performance of LoRa [5], [6], and NB-IoT [7].…”

The Search for a Convergent Option to Deploy Smart Grids on IoT Scenario

“…Advanced modulation techniques and access (CDMA) are also used to make the network virtually immune to interference and increased sensitivity of LoRAWAN embedded interfaces on endpoint devices [6,17].…”

“…4 the protocol stack [18]. Regarding the performance characteristics given in Table 3 [6,17,19] it is observed significant advantages such as data rate available per terminal, uniform latency due to multiple hops absence to connect endpoints to a concentrator and aggregation capacity of terminals per concentrator. In the current version of LoRaWAN, this feature is 50% higher if compared to RF Mesh current version.…”

Dynamic Reconfiguration of LPWANs Pervasive System using Multi-agent Approach

“…The Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) [1] such as LoRaWan [2] or SigFox [3] provides a solution to connect each component or object to the network and monitor their behaviour in real time through their pervasive system layer. For this purpose, we need to develop a mechanism for observing and dynamically updating the system, which can be considered as a dynamic reconfiguration for the initial state of the LPWAN pervasive system.…”