LPWAN Wireless Technology Protocol Comparison: Pros & Cons

LPWAN, or lower power wide area network, has the characteristics of wide coverage, low power consumption, low data transmission & low transmission speed. It is drastically different from the commonly seen Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-wave protocols. All these are used extensively in smart home, AIoT, connected cars, Industrial IoT & other 5G applications.

Within the wide range of wireless network technologies, we can breakdown into below:

If we breakdown LPWAN further, it can be separated into non-licensed frequencies such as LoRa, Sigfox, Weightless, etc. & licensed frequencies such as NB-IoT, eMTC.

LoRa
Developed by the famous US-based Semtech company, it has created a behemoth alliance with 500+ companies such as IBM & Cisco for promoting this new technology.

As with Wi-Fi, the user needs to establish its own gateway, and end devices can communicate bi-directionally with single or multiple gateways.

Sigfox
Made by the well-known Sigfox company in France. To save end device power consumption & maintain bandwidth, The max speed is only 100 bits/s & each endpoint can only upload 140 messages per day, with maximum limit of 12 bytes per message.

Although it is same as LoRA in the non-licensed frequency spectrum, Sigfox in actuality needs telecom operators to build base stations for date transmission. It also provides cloud storage services, which allows the manufacturer to focus on development.

Weightless
Weightless is an open communication protocol proposed by Weightless Special Interest Group. It contains 3 types of standards:

1. Weightless-W is the earliest version which uses the blank frequency spectrum in the TV.

2. Weightless-N is uni-directional communication with speed of 30-100kbit/s, and max transmission distance of 5KM.

3. Weightless-P is bi-directional communication with speed of 100kbit/s, and max transmission distance of 2KM.

NB-IoT
NB-IoT, also known as Narrow Band Internet of Things, is a new wireless standard defined by 3GPP. It is constructed on hive networks of narrowband internet, which only consumes about 180KHz of frequencies.

It can directly deployed on GSM, UMTS, or LTE networks. Because of the low cost of deployment, it is easy to utilize. However, because not all telecom operators have cloud services, the user may need to establish its own cloud platform for receiving information.

Although each LPWAN technologies may have overlapped, each standard may be complimentary in its deployment. For example:

A large factory can first use LoRa for network data collection, then use gateway to convert LoRa to NB-IoT or Sigfox to upload to cloud. This not only decreases the power consumption & deployment, but also decreases the cost of using NB-IoT & Sigfox.

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