Сomparative Analysis of LPWAN technologies

Abstract

The scope of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is expanding year by year. One such area is the engineering of systems for collecting and transmitting information from various sensors for further processing and possible control of technological systems. Examples of such systems are "smart city" systems, environmental pollution control systems, natural disasters forecasting systems, soil moisture systems, etc. The technologies and protocols for building such systems must, first and foremost, be characterized by low energy consumption and cover large territorial areas. The technology of this class is commonly known as LPWAN (Low-power Wide-area Network). This paper solves the problem of analyzing the features of LPWAN technologies by the criteria: openness, coverage range, data rate and deployment cost, for further use in the construction of engineering systems for collecting and transmitting information from various sensors for further processing and possible control of technological systems. It is determined that the selected criteria is most consistent with the LoRaWAN protocol. Compared to other standards, LoRaWAN is the most open standard for creating small private networks. If we are building a LoRa specification network and we have a third-party device that responds to it, then the device in our network is quietly activated and can work. LoRa technology uses frequency bands that do not require licensing. A typical LoRaWAN network consists of the following elements: end devices, gateways, network server, application server.Features of Lora modulation used at the physical layer of the LoRaWAN protocol are considered. LoRa is a "chirp spread spectrum (CSS)" modulation . This is a spread spectrum technique that uses broadband linear frequency modulated (chirp) pulses to encode information.The network architecture is also analyzed in terms of the ability to create your own hardware components. It should be noted that LoRaWAN does not allow communication between devices: packets can only be transmitted from the end device to the network server or vice versa. Thus, communication between devices can only be implemented through an intermediate network server.The openness of LoRaWAN enables you to create your own network components, most notably end devices and gateways, using available technical and hardware solutions that provide the necessary parameters. For example, a Raspberry Pi microcomputer (an estimated cost of $ 38) can be used to build a gateway and an Arduino microcontroller ($ 3) to create end nodes with appropriate sensors.