LPWAN Technology
Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN technology) is one of the new concepts that came into limelight in the year 2013. Most of the IoT devices equipped in the smart cities don’t have any requirement of constant speed as well as the bandwidth of the devices of the buyers.
Many departments use the conventional LTE cellular system while LPWAN technology grew as prominent technology and also the perfect choice of the internet of things applications in the year 2015.
This was the same year when GSM wireless association established a set of Low Power Wide Area networks that drastically help operators in matching the particular cost and the power consumption standard required for the internet of things applications.
History of LPWAN
Image credit and Reference to LankLab.com
Popular LPWAN Technologies examples
In a study, data came to know, by the end of 2020, the number of connected devices will be increased up to 50 billion connected to radio broadcasting.
The market of the internet of things has also been increasing day by day and the low power wide area network has emerged as a low rate long-range radio broadcasting technology in the past few years.
The most known LPWAN technologies are LoRa, NB IoT, and Sigfox which are ideal for large-scale deployment of IoT especially in smart cities and businesses.
Image credit and reference : Ensemble
Sigfox and LoRa have proved its usability already in various sectors whether it’s battery lifetime, cost or efficiency. On the other side, NB-IoT has exhibits the property of latency and quality of service provided.
Moreover, IoT technology is also more powerful in many scenarios, especially for various applications. NB-IoT LPWAN technology depends upon narrowband radio technology that is also considered as the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP).
The specifications of the NB IoT (Narrow Band IoT) LPWAN technology were published in the year 2016 while it’s in a testing phase in Europe. Major testing by two most prominent telecom companies Huawei and Vodafone were also performed in Dec 2016.
In this testing, both companies were integrated to send NB IoT to Spanish Vodafone company and thus it confirmed the successful testing by sending the very first message to the water meter where the device was installed already.
The multinational company Huwaei is still working on NB IoT LPWAN technology and wants to expand this technology all over the world. And it has already deployed these devices in many countries in the year 2018.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Peoples Republic of China has also decided to deploy the NB-IoT LPWAN technology all over the world and they are also insisting to use it for commercial purposes especially for the smart city projects.
Need for LPWAN Technology:
Low Power Wide Area Network delivers great performance for the users that provide many solutions for business cases for the internet of things applications.
This is a great option that consumes less power and cost-efficient as well. It is a power-efficient wireless option to the users that can leverage an existing system with a global reach.
It appears with a strong built-in security feature adding the long-range wireless connectivity as well. Low Power Wide Area Network is particularly built for M2M and IoT devices.
How efficient is LPWAN? (LPWAN applications)
Image Reference: IoTNet
LPWAN technology can reliably deliver operations with IoT devices with a single battery use of up to 10 years. This is one of the best solutions for those systems who have the lack of a reliable power source of recharge.
Low Power Wide Area Network technology is ideal for smart cities, smart building, smart agriculture to track and trace various measurements.
LPWAN technology has the data transfer capability with the narrow periodic data packets ranging from 10 to 1000 bytes. Thus with the help of it, the efficiency and optimized speed of the network can drastically be increased from 5kbps to 350 kbps.
Due to the operation of the LPWAN network with more power and bandwidth efficiency for a vast area, the infrastructure and the hardware needed is not much that can show the cost-efficiency power of Low Power Wide Area Network technology.
Conclusion:
Due to the cost-efficient nature of LPWAN technology, it is drastically used for commercial purposes and besides using it for commercial purposes, some governments have also started the implementation of this technology in various projects.
The speed of the network can also be maintained to a decent level through Low Power Wide Area Network.
See also: What is NFC technology? How does it works? | Near Field Communication
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To study in details about LPWAN network visit LoRa Alliance and Sigfox
