A Survey on Evolved LoRa-Based Communication Technologies for Emerging Internet of Things Applications

Abstract

Survey/review study A Survey on Evolved LoRa-Based Communication Technologies for Emerging Internet of Things Applications Fang Yao 1,3, Yulong Ding 2,3,*, Shengguang Hong 2,4, and Shuang-Hua Yang 2,5,* 1 The Ta-tech company, Nanjing 210009, China 2 Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Safety and Security for Next Generation of Industrial Internet, Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China 3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China 4 The School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150006, China 5 Department of Computer Science, University of Reading, West Berkshire RG6 6UR, United Kingdom * Correspondence: dingyl@sustech.edu.cn; Shuang-hua.yang@reading.ac.uk Received: 17 September 2022 Accepted: 17 October 2022 Published: 22 December 2022 Abstract: The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) greatly extends the coverage area that human being is able to perceive, access, and even control. By connecting various “Things” to the Internet, the IoT makes it possible to measure and manage the physical world as needed. As one of the most widely adopted Low Power Wide Area network technologies, the Long-Range-Radio (LoRa) has the features of long range, low power, and robustness, and thus plays an important role in building IoT applications where IoT objects are connected to the internet at affordable costs. Since the development of LoRa, many IoT applications have adopted LoRa and achieved success in the market. Currently, IoT technologies keep evolving towards different fields, giving rise to multifarious IoT applications including industrial IoT, smart city IoT, healthcare IoT, and direct-to-satellite IoT. In the meantime, LoRa also keeps developing and finding its position in various IoT applications either as a main or complementary player. The objective of this survey is to (1) provide a fundamental understanding of the LoRa technology; (2) explore research activities studying LoRa based communication systems for new IoT applications; and (3) demonstrate how the LoRa technology works together with other technologies to deliver better IoT services to end users.