Low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks are attracting extensive attention because of their abilities to offer low-cost and massive connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) devices distributed over wide geographical areas. This article provides a brief overview on the existing LPWA technologies and useful insights to aid the large-scale deployment of LPWA networks. Particularly, we first review the currently competing candidates of LPWA networks, such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and long range (LoRa), in terms of technical fundamentals and large-scale deployment potential. Then we present two implementation examples on LPWA networks. By analyzing the field-test results, we identify several challenges that prevent LPWA technologies moving from the theory to wide-spread practice.
@article{arxiv.1810.10761,
title = {Low-Power Wide-Area Networks for Sustainable IoT},
author = {Zhijin Qin and Frank Y. Li and Geoffrey Ye Li and Julie A. McCann and Qiang Ni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10761},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
This paper has been accepted by the IEEE Wireless Communication