LPWAN stands for Low Power Wide Area Network, a category of wireless standards for managing long-distance connections between wireless devices. Von the billions of IoT platforms and sensor-enabled devices to be connected in the next few years, more than half will be powered by low-power wideband networks (LWPAN ). LWPAN is both cost-effective and energy-efficient, unlike cellular networks, making it ideal for applications with many energy-saving devices such as irrigation systems and smart lighting.
Lorawan is a cloud-based media access control layer protocol that acts as a network layer protocol to manage communication between LPWAN gateways, end nodes and devices via a routing protocol maintained by the LORA Alliance. Lorawan is the type of LPwan that limits network interference and keeps battery demand low. Due to its many advantages, it is considered one of the best specifications for the LPwan standard.
LORawan is responsible for managing the frequency, data rate and performance of the devices. It defines the communication protocol and system architecture of the network and the physical level of the LORA Alliance to enable far-reaching communication connections.
Terminal devices communicate with one or more of a series of gateways according to the protocols of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) described above in the Lorawan specification. The data is transmitted from the end node device to a central network server by several gateways via data packets.
In most applications, terminal devices are autonomous, battery-powered sensors that digitize physical conditions and environmental events. Lorawan enables terminal devices (sensors and actuators) to connect to the Lorawan network via radio gateways using LORA RF modulation. Gateways transmit messages from terminal devices to network servers via a secure IP-based connection.
LORA gateways support bidirectional communication to process messages between many LORA-based IoT sensors and terminal devices. Manufacturers of IoT platforms and devices (OEMs) can improve time to market faster by leveraging existing reference design guidelines from manufacturers based on their expertise in the IoT and Lorawan networks, embedding Lorawan IoT connectivity in their designs and best practices for optimizing sensor and device connections and data transmission over the IoT network. You can also use global and regional specifications and parameters of Lora Alliance and the Loras Alliance Certification Program to develop IoT sensors terminals that can connect with the Lorawan Network.
LORA is a low-power, long-range wireless communication system that offers attractive features for critical industrial IoT platforms and applications. LORA offers an attractive combination of features such as super long range, low power consumption, multiple usage, minimum cost, encrypted data transmission and can be operated in public and private networks and is able to offer greater coverage compared to mobile networks. Lora is one of the most important wireless communication systems with long range and low power consumption developed by Semtech Corporation.
Lora’s widely used Media Access Control (MAC) protocol limits data rate and the touch cycle of LORAs in its specifications to prevent its relevant applications from requiring real-time transmission on-site. Due to its limited range and vast network, Lorawan is an open standard defined by LORA Alliance, taking into account the energy-efficient nature of technology and the fact that many devices rely on Lora for battery supply [4].
In this chapter we propose a similar approach to enable real-time applications in smart cities that would not have been possible without the benefits of the modulation of LORA for Loravans due to their wide range and energy efficiency.
The LORA Alliance is actively seeking partners for the nationwide LPWA network (as you can see in the list below), and its open nature allows for more opportunities. Lorawan’s Class B mode offers fixed-time options for terminal devices to receive downlinks from the network as an extension to Class A, making it more suitable for the monitoring of sensors and actuators. In addition to class-initiated receive windows, Class B devices can synchronize with the network by using periodic beacons that open ping slots at specific times.
Deterministic latency is programmable to 128 seconds to cater for various applications without additional power consumption at the end of the device, which is low enough for valid battery-powered applications.
Network servers, application servers and join servers provide the central network functionality for Lorawan deployment. These servers are independent of the standard interfaces defined by the LORA Alliance and are simple networks in that they can be implemented on a single node. Network servers implement the Lorawan Linked Network Layer protocol which includes deduplication of uplink messages from terminals that receive more than one gateway and enables gateway nodes to easily convert packets from over-the-air into IP-based messages.
The name LORA refers to the Lo-Ra-NGE (Data Link RF Modulation Technology) Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN). Based on the Open Lorawan Protocol, the network is perfect for applications that need large coverage and deeply integrated communication between a large number of low-power devices to capture a small amount of data.
LORA is a radio modulation technique that allows radio waves to be manipulated to encode information in a multi-symbol format using chirping or chirping spread spectrum technologies. It is a term that refers to a system that supports this technology for the use of communication networks and IoT platforms and applications. Mobile network operators offer the Open Lorawan Protocol and CAT-M1 as complementary technologies.
The Internet of Things is an umbrella term for all interconnected things as they communicate, transmit data, and the technologies that enable them to think about the goal of communication and action. It builds on an earlier idea of Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing as he described it in his article in Scientific American, “The Computer of the 21st Century,” in 1991 in which he described a future world consisting of numerous interconnected computers designed to weave themselves into everyday life and “untenable from everyday life”.