Low Power Wide Area Networks: An Overview

By Usman Raza, Parag Shankar Kulkarni, Mahesh Sooriyabandara. 2016

1,763 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, 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 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.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A survey of data fusion in smart city applications (2019, background): “…low-latency, and cost-effective communication technologies and networks, such as, 5G [27]–[29], wireless sensor networks (WSN) [30]–[32], Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) [33], [34], and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) [35], [36] and their integration in smart city projects is also relentless.”
Emerging indicators of fish welfare in aquaculture (2021, methodology): “LPWANs are commonly used in ‘Internet of Things’ technology 187 .”
Survey on Multi-Access Edge Computing for Internet of Things Realization (2018, background): “vacy [12], trust [13], Social Internet of Things (SIoT) [14], communication [15], context awareness [16], and future directions [6], [17].”
A Survey on LoRa Networking: Research Problems, Current Solutions, and Open Issues (2019, background): “Semtech’s white paper [23] explains how LoRa LPWAN could provide efﬁcient usage and governance to make cities smart.”
LoRaWAN — A low power WAN protocol for Internet of Things: A review and opportunities (2017, methodology): “Sigfox is a cellular system approach that allows end-devices connecting to base stations equipped with software-defined cognitive radios using the BPSK (Binary Phase Shift Keying) modulation [15].”
A Survey of Indoor Localization Systems and Technologies (2017, background): “Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) such as LoRA and Sigfox in its current shape cannot provide high localization accuracy and must be combined with other localization techniques and technologies for higher localization accuracy [156].”
A Survey on Emerging SDN and NFV Security Mechanisms for IoT Systems (2019, neutral): “, Narrowband IoT) [44].”
UbeHealth: A Personalized Ubiquitous Cloud and Edge-Enabled Networked Healthcare System for Smart Cities (2018, background): “Other standards proposed by various researchers can be found in [62], [65], and [66].”
Scalability Analysis of Large-Scale LoRaWAN Networks in ns-3 (2017, background): “These types of requirements are hard to fulﬁll using traditional Machine to Machine technologies such as cellular or WPAN [2].”
Technology and Market Perspective for Indoor Photovoltaic Cells (2019, neutral): “communication with high data rates and is even supported by smartphones [10], Sigfox uses a cellular like system over ultra-narrow band that requires low energy [11] while backscatter technologies avoid the use of active radios by modulating and reflecting the incoming RF signal [12].”
Overview of Cellular LPWAN Technologies for IoT Deployment: Sigfox, LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT (2018, background): “It allows up to 40 km as communication range in rural zones and 10 km in urban zones [2], up to 10 years of battery lifetime [3], less than 5$ of device cost, and less than 1$ per device per year of operator subscription cost [4].”
Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges (2020, background): “The three main technologies in the LPWAN family are the NB-IoT, Long-Range (LoRa) and Sigfox [147].”
Machine Learning for Resource Management in Cellular and IoT Networks: Potentials, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges (2019, background): “The authors in [32] presented emerging LPWA technologies and the standardization activities carried out by different standards development organizations (e.”
Adaptive configuration of lora networks for dense IoT deployments (2018, background): “been proposed for Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) [1, 2].”
Massive Access for 5G and Beyond (2020, background): “Currently, long range radio (LoRa) and cellular IoT are two main access technologies for low power wide area networks (LPWAN) [11]-[13].”
An Overview of Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Analytics in Agriculture: Benefits and Challenges (2018, background): “The LPWA makes use of low power and can cover wide area [24], [25].”