LoRaWAN Goes the Distance at Low Power

IoT’s Versatile Protocol for Long-Range, Wide-Area Connectivity

- Pedro Bertoleti

This is the first of a two-part series about LoRaWAN communication applied to IoT embedded systems. Pedro explains how it works, its benefits, limitations, and some real-world use cases, using this low-power, long-range, wide-area, and robust communication protocol alternative for systems with no direct connection to the Internet.

In today's embedded solutions, one of the most important requirements is communication. Most of the devices that take part of our day-to-day routines have to communicate directly or indirectly with cloud services, to enable integration with a much bigger solution, for example, utility remote measurement devices. Network communication is thus the embedded device's best friend today.

Most of the embedded devices that fit the description above are both battery-powered and located far away from the data collection base (or radio base). The communication used in such cases therefore must be long-range and must consume as little electric energy as possible. For those use cases, one of the most adequate, reliable, secure, and popular LPWANS (low-power, wide area networks) is the long-range, wide-area network, or LoRaWAN.

In this article, I will show you why LoRaWAN is an ideal communication protocol for enabling limited communication systems to integrate with cloud systems. I aim to explain what LoRaWAN is and how it's structured, and I present some real-world solutions that use LoRaWAN.

LORA VS LORAWAN