Low Power Wide Area Network Technologies for IoT: Availability, Design Choices and Implications

The connectivity requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) are remarkably different from broadband applications and often conflicting. Recent effort in low-power wide area network (LP-WAN) for IoT applications has led to the development of plethora of new access technologies. The result is that organisations and end users of IoT services are faced with overwhelming choices of access technologies that they often do not know where or how to begin their IoT roadmap as part of their wider digital transformation journey. This paper reviews the performance of IoT access technologies. It also includes sensitivity analysis which describes the network performance in response to changes in system design parameters. Results show that of all the parameters considered, receiver sensitivity is the most significant for system optimisation. For example it is shown that with a 10% improvement in receiver sensitivity, LoRaWAN can increase coverage by 141.7% without adverse effects on the power requirement. Finally, we report that subject to regulatory constraints, the transceiver's battery is affected by data rate, pay load length, number of message per day and spreading factor (LoRa only). For instance with Sigfox, the US specification (600bps) can provide a battery life about 9.4 years longer than the European specification (100bps).