LoRaWAN Technology

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a network of millions of devices around the world that connect to the Internet and measure, monitor, and provide rich data. Today's Internet of Things consists of many loosely connected networks, each of which solves its own problems. For example, in an office building, multiple LoRaWAN based IoT solutions can be deployed at the same time: one for controlling air conditioning, the other for heating systems, lighting, security, and other IoT applications.

These IoT networks can operate according to different standards, and it is not easy to combine them into a network. Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology can support a large number of Internet of Things use cases. Although there are many LPWAN technologies, remote (LoRa technology) and its network architecture LoRaWAN are the most widely used technologies. LoRa provides a series of physical layer communication settings, such as bandwidth, spread spectrum factor, coding rate and transmission frequency. These settings affect throughput, reliability, and communication range.

LoRa and LoRaWAN ® What's the difference between the Internet?

LPWAN (Low Power WAN) is a wireless WAN technology that can interconnect low bandwidth, battery powered IoT devices at low bit rates over long distances. There are many options for building an LPWAN network, but LoRaWAN and NB IoT technologies show the greatest momentum and will gain the largest market share of LPWA in the next few years.

LoRaWAN defines the communication protocol and system architecture of the network, while LoRa physical layer supports remote communication links. Protocols and network architectures have the greatest impact on battery life, network capacity, quality of service, security, and the diversity of applications served by the network.

LoRa is a radio signal transmission protocol, which uses chirped multi symbol format to transmit data. In essence, these chips are traditional ISM band radio chips, which can use LoRa (or other modulation types, such as FSK) to convert radio frequencies into bits without writing code. In addition to wide area communication, LoRa technology is a lower level physical layer technology used in various applications.

LoRaWAN protocol is a low-power WAN protocol based on LoRa radio modulation. It manages the communication between the terminal node IoT device and the network gateway, and connects the device to the Internet through wireless connection. LoRaWAN is a point to multipoint network protocol. This is not just about radio waves; This is about how they interact with the LoRaWAN gateway to provide functions such as encryption and identification.

How does LoRaWAN work?

At the most basic level, radio technologies like LoRaWAN are simple. The best metaphor for LoRaWAN networks is cellular networks. LoRa based devices have a module connected to the gateway, which is the local central location. Consider how your phone sends and receives data through the cell phone tower. The gateway acts as a conduit between the device and the server. The network server uses the Internet to communicate with the gateway and instructs it to interact with IoT devices. In other words, the network server is responsible for deleting duplicate packets, confirming the integrity of the data, and performing security checks. In addition, nodes in the star architecture do not need to listen to messages from other nodes all the time. Therefore, they may spend most of their time "sleeping", thus reducing their energy use.