Survey of the low power wide area network technologies

Abstract

With the number of connected devices in Internet of Things (IoT) increasing, the requirements for connectivity (e.g., battery life, deployment cost and coverage) are evolving to ensure effective communication between these devices. The emerging low power wide area (LPWA) technologies pave a way to address the problem as they can provide affordable connectivity to the low power devices over very large areas. In this paper, we first review the state-of-the-art wireless communication approaches in IoT and introduce the LPWA technologies by evaluating their performance in different metrics including coverage, bandwidth, cost, and so on. Then we survey different LPWA technologies and analyze their features by undertaking a detailed comparison. Furthermore, a number of challenges in developing different LPWA technologies are investigated and potential solutions are proposed to address these challenges. By exploring the characteristics of these LPWA technologies in different application domains, this paper provides guidance for efficiently solving the problems of the long-range communication between IoT devices, which have grown exponentially with people's growing demand for network applications.