Access at arm’s reach, How IoT with LPWAN is revolutionizing the world!

With IoT (Internet of things) making our everyday tasks easy at work as well as at home, not only that, it making things easy for everyone, but also helping cope up with the global challenges that we are facing every day.

While specifying most important projects which are covered by IoT and have made things way easier than before are smart city applications, personal applications or home appliances, smart grid and smart metering, industrial assets monitoring, critical infrastructure monitoring, agriculture, logistics, and animals. Being able to imply this in different business sectors, with a variety of applications.

LPWAN has also been operating differently than other networks by making certain drastic decisions, with the range of networks used. Let me brief you in a simpler, layman’s language on what is LPWAN and then drive you through different operators across the world.

LPWANs:

LPWAN low-power wireless area network technology is the network that interconnects low-bandwidth, powered devices with low bit rates over long ranges, that is allowing devices to send small amounts of data over great distances for many years on a single battery. This technology came into light as a term in 2013 as a class of wireless technologies that are well suited to the specific needs of machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT devices.

Types of LPWANs:

Sigfox:

Sigfox is the world’s leading service provider for the Internet of things (IoT). Connects your physical world with the digital universe and power industry transformation with one global 0G network. It drastically reduces energy consumption and costs of connected devices where all the network and computing complexity rather than managed on the devices, it is managed in the cloud by offering a software-based communications solution. Over a public network running in 868 MHz or 902 MHz bands, allows single operator per country, delivers 30–50 km in rural, 30 to 10 km in urban. The package size is 150 messages and 12 bytes.

LORA alliance:

The LORA Alliance is the fastest growing technology. Unlicensed and a non-profit association committed through the development of LORAWAN to enabling the large deployment of LPWAN IoT. The Standardization and the accredited certification LoRa alliance provides to deliver the interoperability needed for LPWAN networks to scale. Transmits its several sub-GHz frequencies, which is less prone to interference. Chirp spread spectrum modulation derivative. Users can define the size of the packet. LoRaWAN manages communication between LPWAN devices and gateways being the media access control (MAC) layer protocol.

NB-IoT & LTE — M:

NB — IoT & LTE — M significantly improves the consumption of the power of the devices. Having a battery life of more than 10 years supports a wide range of used cases. It is supported by all major mobile equipment, module manufacturers, and chipset. It is co-existed with 2g 3g 4g mobile networks. Offering uplink and downlink around 200kbps. Operates on a licensed spectrum with 3GPP standards. Benefit from all the security and privacy features of mobile networks, such as support for user identity confidentiality, entity authentication, confidentiality, data integrity, and mobile equipment identification.

Weightless SIG:

Weightless SIG has developed three LPWAN standards: The unidirectional Weightless-N, bidirectional Weightless-P, and Weightless-W, which is also bidirectional and runs off of unused TV spectrum. Weightless-N and Weightless-P are often more popular options due to Weightless-W’s shorter battery life. Weightless-N and Weightless-P run in the sub-1 GHz unlicensed spectrum but also support licensed spectrum operation using 12.5 kHz narrowband technology.

Summing up:

Summing up with the brand new information for my crowd, as it was a lot of technical information. LPWAN with IoT is an industry implying technology to every part of our day. Usage of products and adding perks to it is all it does.