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Survey of the low power wide area network technologies

Fei Gu, Jianwei Niu, Landu Jiang, Xue Liu, Mohammed Atiquzzaman

PII: S1084-8045(19)30319-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2019.102459
Reference: YJNCA 102459

To appear in: Journal of Network and Computer Applications

Received Date: 2 May 2019

Revised Date: 5 September 2019
Accepted Date: 28 September 2019

Please cite this article as: Gu, F., Niu, J., Jiang, L., Liu, X., Atiquzzaman, M., Survey of the low power
wide area network technologies, Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2019), doi: https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2019.102459.

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 Survey of the Low Power Wide Area Network
Technologies
Fei Gu1, Jianwei Niu2,3,4, Landu Jiang5, Xue Liu5, Mohammed Atiquzzaman6
School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China1
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Computer
Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China2
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing (BDBC),
Beihang University, Beijing, China3
Hangzhou Innovation Research Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China4
School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada5
School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA6
gufei@suda.edu.cn, niujianwei@buaa.edu.cn, landu.jiang@mail.mcgill.ca,
xueliu@cs.mcgill.ca, atiq@ou.edu

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.

I. INTRODUCTION

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) enables the pervasive connectivity
between machines through wireless communication, which has brought a great convenience
to many domains of people’s daily life, such as smart homes [54], intelligent transportation
[64], and garbage monitoring [43], etc. IoT devices sense the surrounding information and
share it among themselves as well as with humans to provide efficient services [25] [48]. The
number of connected IoT devices is predicted to be more than 25 billion by 2020 [28], and it
will bring a revenue of 7 trillion dollars [20], as seen in Fig. 1.
 Worldwide IoT Revenue Worldwide IoT Devices
8000 30

7000
25
6000

Connected devices (B)

20

Revenue ($B)
5000

4000 15

3000
10
2000
5
1000

0 0
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Year
Fig. 1. Worldwide IoT connected devices and revenues forecast [3].

On the other hand, due to different communication requirements, these IoT devices are
suffering more and more limitations (power energy, deployment cost, and coverage), which
will prevent further performance improvements [55]. Since recently, there is no commercial
technology that can provide efficient connectivity under different situations (including short-
range and long-range) to overcome these limitations. Thus, it is urgent to develop the
appropriate technologies to address different requirements for different IoT applications. For
the short-range wireless networks, there are several efficient techniques to achieve the
communication, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, Long-term Evolution (LTE), etc. These
approaches can provide high speed data transmissions and reliable communications between
IoT devices. However, they have a high cost of deployment and need high energy
consumption that are not suitable for long range communication, which requires the devices
to operate at low power. As a result, a number of new wireless protocols called Low Power
Wide Area (LPWA) networks, are motivated to implement the long-range communication at
low power. They can provide low power consumption, high energy efficiency and high
coverage capabilities. Fig. 2 shows the comparison between LPWA networks and other
connectivity technologies in terms of bandwidth, power consumption, range and cost [7].

Fig. 2. Comparison between LPWA networks and other connectivity technologies [7].
Recently, there are several survey papers focusing on LPWA network technologies. Mekki et
al. provided a comprehensive study of Sigfox, LoRa, and NB-IoT in terms of battery lifetime,
capacity, and cost [42]. Moreover, they also considered the application scenarios and
explained which technology is the best for each scenario. However, they cannot investigate
all the key LPWA network technologies and make a comparison to demonstrate the
difference between these LPWA network technologies. Raza et al. also surveyed different
LPWA technologies and the standardization activities of different organizations [49]. They
also analyzed the research challenges and proposed possible solutions to these challenges.
However, the paper did not provide a detailed comparison between these technologies in
terms of deployment model, encryption, roaming and so on. Ali et al. provided a detailed
survey of communication technologies, architectures and development platforms that can
support the growth of M2M applications [13]. They cannot analyze the development
challenges of LPWA technologies and introduce the different application domains.

In this paper, we provide a concrete definition of LPWA and differentiate it from other IoT
communication technologies in terms of different metrics, such as energy consumption,
deployment cost, etc. We survey the state-of-the-art prominent LPWA technologies and
analyze their features by undertaking a detailed comparison between them. In addition, we
also investigate the challenges in developing different LPWA technologies and propose some
possible solutions to address them. Furthermore, we explore different LPWA application
domains and present how to choose LPWA technology to make the connectivity more
efficiently.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the definition and design
goals of LPWA, while Section III shows the key LPWA technologies and features. Section
IV demonstrates a detailed comparison between these key technologies. Section V describes
the use cases of LPWA technologies and explains how to select the appropriate technology to
use in a specific application domain. We investigate the challenges in developing LPWA
technologies and propose some potential solutions to address them in Section VI. Finally,
Section VII concludes the paper.

II. DEFINITION AND DESIGN GOALS OF LPWA

Fig. 3. LPWA network architecture [52].

A. Definition of LPWA

LPWA is a novel communication scheme that uses low power energy to achieve the long-
range Machine to Machine (M2M) communication with low data transmission rate. Fig. 3
shows a typical LPWA network architecture [52], which is similar to typical cellular network
architecture. LPWA techniques usually have a star network topology. The surrounding data is
collected on nodes and transmitted to base stations. Due to the duty cycle regulations of base
stations, LPWA technologies do not need to relay large amounts of data from the gateway to
nodes, which will lower the power energy consumption and increase the reliability of the
communication. LPWA networks also have a promising market that approximately 25% of
IoT devices will use this communication technology [49].

The appearance of LPWA technologies makes up for the deficiency that the traditional
cellular and short range IoT technologies cannot transmit long distance or the deployment
cost is too high. The range of short-range wireless networks (e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee, and
WiFi) is limited to a few dozen meters at best [53]. Although cellular networks, such as LTE,
Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), etc. can achieve long-distance
transmission through multi-hop mesh networking, it is not the most ideal solution, because
the cost of network deployment and communication is too high [29]. In order to lower the
cost of long-range communication, LPWA technologies, which can achieve a long range of a
few to tens of kilometers, and battery life of ten years and beyond at the expense of low data
rate (about 10 kb/s), are proposed for connecting ubiquitous IoT devices [46]. Note that
LPWA technologies achieve long transmission range and low power consumption at the
expense of low transmission rate (typically tens of kb/s) and high latency (typically a few
seconds or minutes). In summary, LPWA technologies are only suitable for these use cases
that are tolerance to the network delay, require low power consumption and low cost, and
have no need on the transmission rate.

B. Design Goals

LPWA technologies are designed to offer low power connectivity for large number of
devices over a wide area at low cost. Low power refers to using a cheap power source (e.g., a
button cell or a pair of AA batteries) to enable the IoT devices to function autonomously for a
long period of time (up to 10 years). Wide area refers to a long direct communication
distance between two IoT devices, which enables the coverage of city or rural area without
using complex mesh networking technique. In this section, we like to highlight the design
goals of LPWA technologies, including long range, low power, low cost, and scalability.

Long Range. Wide area coverage is an important design goal of LPWA technologies, which
can be achieved by exploiting several factors, such as sub 1GHz, special modulation schemes,
etc. The deployment environment (rural, urban, etc.) also has an impact on the
communication range from a few to tens of kilometers.

• Using Sub 1GHz bands: Most LPWA technologies use sub 1GHz to offer robust and
reliable wireless communication with a few exception (e.g. Weightless-W [11] and
Ingenu [5]). Because when encountering obstacles, the communication signal with
lower frequency has less attenuation and multiple path fading. Moreover, sub 1GHz is
less congested than 2.4 GHz, in which multiple protocols (e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee,
WiFi, etc.) are running simultaneously. As a result, using sub 1GHz can lower the
possibility of interference between different communication techniques [16].

• Modulation Schemes: In LPWA technologies, the modulation rate and data rate are
slowed down to save more energy to transmit the data and then the receivers can
decode the attenuated signals correctly. Generally speaking, there are two types of
modulation schemes adapted in different LPWA technologies, including narrowband
and wideband techniques. Narrowband technology first compresses sensed data into
ultra-narrow bands and then uses signal processing techniques to decompress data
 [50][31], while wideband technology adopts a larger bandwidth than needed and
utilizes frequency diversity to express the sensed data.

Low Power. LPWA technologies also need to be run with a cheap power source (e.g., a
button cell or a pair of AA batteries) as they either do not or cannot easily replace the power
source. As a result, under the low power circumstances, the longer the lifetime of power
source, the more suitable for LPWA connectivity. To lower the energy consumption in
designing LPWA technologies, some of the following aspects should be taken into
consideration.

• Topology. In short range wireless networks, mesh networking technique is adapted to

extend the transmission range, which will cause a high deployment cost. In addition,
the data will be transmitted to the end devices through multiple hops, resulting in
quick depletion of the batteries [45]. To address this limitation, most LPWA
technologies adapt a star topology, where the sensed nodes connect to a base station
directly. There is no need for the dense and expensive deployments of relays and
gateways altogether. In this case, it saves the energy for the communication and
provides a quick access to the end devices [49].

• Duty Cycling. In order to further save energy consumption, LPWA devices are
designed to turn off the power hungry components opportunistically. Specifically,
when the data is to be transmitted or received, the device is turned on. In LPWA
networks, the duty cycling mechanisms are used according to several factors, such as
the applications, communication pattern, type of power source, etc. By designing a
listening schedule between the end device and base station, different components of
IoT devices (e.g., uplink module or downlink module) could be wakeup accordingly
[57]. In addition, duty cycling is also a legislative requirement that a transmitter is
limited to occupy the channel at a certain time to ensure the coexistence with other
devices [22].

• Lightweight Medium Access Control. The most popular Medium Access Control
(MAC) protocol in cellular networks and short-range wireless networks is exploiting
frequency and time diversity to synchronize base stations and the User Equipment
(UE) accurately [63]. However, this MAC protocol is not suitable for LPWA
networks as the cheap end devices (less than 5$) do not have high quality oscillators
to achieve the function. Therefore, a simple random access scheme -- ALOHA is
adapted and performs well in LPWA technologies, because it keeps the transceiver
simple and low cost [53]. Moreover, TDMA-based protocols are also adapted by
several LPWA technologies to improve the efficiency [23].

• Offloading Complexity. Many complex components of the application are offloaded to

the base stations for simplifying the design of end devices [33]. Thus the base stations
have to exploit hardware diversity to be capable of receiving and transmitting
multiple tasks from different end devices. However, it brings a high communication
consumption for the whole network. To address the challenge, we have to make a
trade-off between offloading the tasks to the base stations and running on local
devices because different IoT applications have different requirements, such as
bandwidth, data rate, latency, etc.
Low Cost. Low cost is also a key design goal of LPWA technologies. LPWA networks have
success in connecting a large number of end devices and lowering the cost of devices
deployment and network communication, while ensuring the quality of connectivity at the
same time. These features enable LPWA technologies to compete favorably compared with
short range wireless technologies and cellular networks. LPWA technologies adopt several
measures to reduce the cost for the end devices and network communication as follows.

• Simplifying Hardware. LPWA technologies are designed to address fewer complex

tasks compared with traditional cellular networks and short-range wireless
technologies [29]. Moreover, there is no need to deploy some expensive
infrastructures (e.g., gateways, relay nodes, etc.) as LPWA technologies can provide
tens of thousands of devices distributed over a long distance (up to tens of kilometers).
Therefore, it can reduce some additional parts, such as transceiver footprint, peak data
rates, etc. for simplifying the hardware to lower the cost.

• Using License-free or Owned Licensed Bands. There is a conflict between licensing

new spectrum and deploying low cost devices because using a new spectrum will
increase the cost to network operators. Thus, most LPWA technologies utilize license-
free bands, such as Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band, TV-white spaces,
etc. Some LPWA technologies also share the cellular bands to avoid additional
licensing cost, which is detailed in Section III. However, these measures can cause the
interference between different LPWA technologies as they share the same band. A
stand-alone licensed band is also utilized to improve the performance of
communication.

Scalability. Deploying a large amounts of end devices for sending low traffic volumes is
another important requirement of LPWA technologies. These technologies should perform
well with the number of connected devices increasing. There are few measures proposed to
cope with this scalability goal.

• Adapting Diversity Techniques. It is essential to exploit the diversity in channel, time,

space and hardware to accommodate massive connected devices. As the devices are
cheap and low power in LPWA technologies, utilizing more powerful components
(e.g., the base stations and backend systems) to implement the diversity is possible
and promising. By employing multiple channels and multiple antenna communication,
LPWA technologies can parallelize the transmissions and reduce the interference
efficiently.

• Using Adaptive Channel Selection and Data Rate. Many LPWA technologies use
adaptive channels selection and data rate to extend the number of connected devices.
Selecting the best channel to transmit data reliably requires efficient monitoring of the
link qualities and coordination between devices and networks. Depending on the
underlying LPWA technology, using the adaptive modulation can utilize the channel
efficiently and provide a reliable communication.

III. KEY LPWA TECHNOLOGIES

Nowadays, there are several competing LPWA technologies utilized in IoT devices. Each of
them has its particular features to achieve the communication at low power over a long range.
In this section, we explore the key LPWA technologies including NB-IoT, LoRa, Sigfox,
Weightless, Telensa, Ingenu, and Dash7, as shown in Fig 4. Moreover, we also analyze their
different functions and specific characteristics.

LoRa Sigfox

NB-IoT

LPWA Technologies Weightless-W

Dash7 Weightless Weightless-N

Telensa Weightless-P
Ingenu

Fig. 4. Key LPWA technologies.

GSM NB-IoT LTE NB-IoT LTE NB-IoT

Carrier Carrier Carrier Carrier Carrier Carrier

freq(x) freq(x) freq(x)

Stand-alone Guard band In-band
operation operation operation
Fig. 5. NB-IoT operation mode [24].

Fig. 6. NB-IoT network architecture [29].

A. NB-IoT

NB-IoT (NarrowBand IoT), Machine Type Communications (MTC) and Extended Coverage
GSM (EC-GSM) are the three new technologies introduced and defined in 3rd Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP) release 13 to provide a wide range communication and low cost
for specific IoT applications with a low data rate. Different from other two new technologies
enhanced from previous work, NB-IoT is considered as a new technology, which can co-exist
but not fully backward compatible with existing 3GPP technologies [58]. Despite NB-IoT is
integrated into LTE standard, it simplifies many features of LTE to reduce the cost and
minimize the energy consumption, such as using a different cell search process, exploiting a
different bandwidth, adapting a modified random access technique, etc. Compromise on the
data rate, latency and spectrum efficiency results in the increased coverage and reduced
power consumption. Moreover, by exploiting a narrower band, the price of the NB-IoT chip
is also reduced so as to be deployed widely.

NB-IoT utilizes the licensed frequency bands as LTE and employs Quadrature Phase Shift
Keying (QPSK) modulation. Generally speaking, there are three different deployment
scenarios, namely stand-alone, guard band, and in-band, as shown in Fig. 5 [24]. In stand-
alone scenario, NB-IoT is deployed in a standalone 200 kHz of spectrum and the power
consumption at base stations is used for transmission to increase coverage [58]. In guard band
operation mode, NB-IoT and LTE are co-located, and thus they share the same power
amplifier and the transmission power [61]. However, in in-band mode, NB-IoT is deployed
within an LTE wide-band, where the transmit power at base stations is shared between these
two technologies without performance compromise [47].

Fig. 7. Control plane and user plane in EPS [53].

As shown in Figs. 6 and 7, the network architecture of NB-IoT is based on Evolved Packet
System (EPS), which includes two optimizations, namely, user plane optimization and
control plane optimization. Both the plane optimizations choose the best path for downlink
and uplink data. The downlink is based on OFDMA with 15 kHz subcarrier spacing, while
the uplink supports multi-tone and single-tone transmissions. Multi-tone transmission has 15
kHz subcarrier spacing and is based on SC-FDMA, while in single-tone transmission, the
subcarrier spacing has two values, 15 kHz or 3.75 kHz [39].

B. LoRa

LoRa (Long Range) developed and commercialized by Semtech Corporation is an emerging

physical layer technology, which operates on an unlicensed band below 1 GHz to provide a
wide area network capability [9]. There are 433 MHz and 868 MHz available in Europe,
while 868 MHz is the most commonly used due to its broader frequency and less strict duty
cycle requirements. It adopts spread spectrum modulation derived from Chirp Spread
Spectrum (CSS) modulation to implement a bidirectional communication [51]. CSS was
developed in the 1940s and widely used in military detection as it has a long communication
distance and less interference. LoRa is the first commercial usage with low cost
implementation over long distances, which uses integrated Forward Error Correction (FEC)
to ensure the effectiveness of communication [21].

LoRaWAN is the most well supported upper layer protocol for LoRa. It is a non-profit
protocol managed by the LoRa Alliance, which supports the secure communication for
payloads ranging from 19 to 250 bytes. LoRaWAN has very small message capacity of 12
bytes. Deploying such a network requires a NetID from the LoRa Alliance or purchasing the
right from a network provider that can build a private LoRaWAN network. The
communication range of LoRaWAN depends on several factors, such as transmission power,
bandwidth, carrier frequency, coding scheme, and spread factors [17]. The spread factor
means the ratio between symbol rate and chip rate, which has six available values (7-12).
Increasing the spread factor results in increasing the robustness to noise and decreasing the
data rate. As a result, higher spread factors could achieve a longer communication range with
lower data rate.

Fig. 8. LoRaWAN network architecture [15].

Fig. 9. Typical system architecture of a LoRaWAN end device [14].

A typical LoRaWAN architecture is shown in Fig. 8, in which gateways are adapted to relay
the messages between a central network and end devices. In a LoRaWAN network, end
nodes are not associated with a specific gateway, but connected with multiple gateways
through single-hop communication for transmitting sensed data. The gateways receive the
data and forward to network server through backhaul networks (e.g., cellular, ethernet, WiFi,
and satellite). The network server has the ability to address the duplicate data from multiple
gateways and return the response to ensure the communication successfully. Fig. 9
demonstrates that there are usually three types of device class in LoRaWAN networks,
namely Class A, Class B, and Class C. Class A is the lowest power device, which spends
most of the time in sleep mode and is only waked on a scheduled time or when it needs to
transmit data. Class B extended from Class A opens extra receive windows at scheduled time
to determine the time of receiving data. Class C has the minimum latency as it is always
listening to receive the data at any time except when transmitting data.

C. Sigfox

Sigfox is an efficient solution to address LPWA network connectivity. Due to low cost and
the significant performance in the communication, it has opened a successful market in
Europe, especially in France, where the Sigfox Company was founded in 2009. Without
deploying gateways, users are supposed to purchase end devices and subscriptions from
network providers for each of them to connect to regional Sigfox networks. As shown in Fig.
10, Sigfox utilizes a cloud server to receive and process the sensed data, and then sends it to a
backend server. In addition, customers also can access the data through a web portal and
relay the data by means of implementing callbacks [44].

Radio SIGFOX
Access Cloud
Network interfaces

Connected Business
devices SIGFOX customer/
Cloud partner IT
platform

SIGFOX
Network
Fig. 10. Sigfox network architecture [7].

Sigfox is a ultra-narrowband technology, which operates on the unlicensed sub 1 GHz bands.
Specifically, it splits the subbands (868.180MHz to 868.220MHz) into 400 separate 100 Hz
subbands, forty of which are reserved [2]. Due to the ultra-narrowband, it has a very low
noise and enables decoding the signals easily. The coverage of Sigfox can achieve 20-50 km
and 3-10 km in rural and urban areas, respectively. Sigfox shares the same frequency as LoRa
and thus should follow the duty cycle regulations for ensuring the successful communication
without interference. Moreover, Sigfox only supports uplink communication at the initial
time, and later evolves into a bidirectional communication with a significant link asymmetry.
Downlink communication only precedes uplink communication after which the device should
wait for a response. In addition, uplink communication and downlink communication also
adapt different modulation schemes, in which Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) and
Gaussian Frequency Shift Keying (GFSK) are operated respectively [40].

D. Weightless

Weightless is a set of several LPWA technologies including Weightless-W, Weightless-N,

Weightless-P [59]. They are defined and managed by the Weightless-SIG (Special Interest
Group), which is a non-profit standards organization and founded in 2008. Weightless-SIG
have five core members, Accenture, ARM, M2COMM, Sony-Europe, and Telensa. A basic
view of the Weightless network is shown in Fig. 11. Both these three technologies operate in
the sub 1 GHz unlicensed spectrum, but each of them has its own characteristics.

Fig. 11. Weightless network architecture [12].

Weightless-W. Weightless-W makes use of the TV whitespace spectrum and provides a long
range of modulation schemes, packet sizes and spread factors. By exploiting these features
and the link budget, Weightless-W can achieve a low overhead communication with the date
rates ranging from 1 kbps to 10 Mbps. Because of the high cost in deployment, the battery
life of end devices is up to 3 years and the communication range between the end device and
the base stations can reach 5 km. In addition, the communication range also depends on the
environmental factors, such as obstacles, weather, etc [59].

Weightless-N. Similar to Sigfox technology, Weightless-N is designed to use a class of low-

cost technology to implement the communication. By utilizing ISM bands, Weightless-N
adopts ultra-narrowband modulation scheme born out of Nwave's technology to provide low
data rate communication (up to 100 bps) [8]. Due to the low cost in deployment, the battery
life of end devices can be extended up to 10 years and the communication range of
Weightless-N also can reach 5 km, which is the same as that of Weightless-W.

Weightless-P. Weightless-P is a new technology, which is born out of M2COMM’s Platanus

technology [1]. By combining the appropriate features of previous standards, Weightless-P
focuses on the industrial sector, which can achieve a bidirectional communication with the
data rates ranging from 200 bps to 100 kbps. Weightless-P adapts ultra-narrowband
modulation schemes (GMSK and offset-QPSK) and operates on the 12.5 kHz channels to
enable the band to be used efficiently. Weightless-P adapts several measures to provide a
reliable communication, such as acknowledged transmissions, auto-retransmission, frequency
synchronization, etc. With these advanced features running, the communication range of
Weightless-P is limited to 2 km and the battery life is also not more than 3 years.

E. Telensa

Telensa is a proprietary LPWA network that makes wireless smart city control systems,
including intelligent lighting, smart parking, and so on [56]. Moreover, it supports third party
software by providing smart city API [10]. Telensa PLANet is the market-leading Central
Management System (CMS) for smart streetlights, which has been deployed in more than 50
cities worldwide. Both these applications are defined as end-to-end systems with edge-nodes
(telecells) and the end-user interface (base stations). Typically, a Telensa base station can
connect to up to 5000 nodes, and reach the real range of 2-3 km and 5-8 km in urban areas
and rural areas, respectively.

DATA API, dashboards, analytics ...... Smart City Data Platforms

APPS PLANet ...... Traffic ...... Waste ...... Drainage ...... Air quality

NETWORKS UNB ...... Celluar (NB-IoT) ...... Other LPWA (LoRa, Sigfox, etc.)

SENSORS Streetlight (telecell) ...... Traffic ...... Waste ...... Drainage ...... Air quality
Fig. 12. Telensa’s technology architecture [10].

The company of Telensa founded in 2005, was formerly a part of renowned electronic design
consultancy Plextek [10]. The technology architecture of Telensa is shown in Fig. 12. It
provides an Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) solution in the sub 1GHz unlicensed ISM bands and
has the unique combination of long range, low power and bidirectional communication for
massive numbers of devices [41]. Although there is no publicly available information about
the technology implementation details, Telensa aims to standardize its technology through
the Low Throughput Networks (LTN) specifications of European Technical Standards
Institute (ETSI) for an easy integration.

F. Ingenu

Ingenu, founded in 2008 and formerly known as On-Ramp Wireless, proposed a LPWA
network technology based on Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA) technology, which
operates on the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The company was renamed to Ingenu in 2015 and the
focus varied from the utilities to gas and oil verticals [6]. Using the 2.4 GHz ISM bands,
Ingenu's hardware has been tested to provide long-range communications at low-power,
where the coverage can achieve a range of 16 km by maximizing the transmission power.
The security and network architecture of Ingenu is shown in Fig. 13.

Fig. 13. Security and network architecture of Ingenu [5].

Ingenu enables multiple nodes to share the same time slot. The nodes acquire the time and
frequency from the downlink frame and Ingenu scatters the channel access within the slot by
adding a random delay for each node. Ingenu can reduce overlapping between the transmitted
signals by not granting the channel access to the node exactly at once. For the receiving side,
the base stations decode the signals received at different times by adopting multiple
demodulators, such as an adaptive data rate technique that can select optimum spread factor
based on the downlink signal strength. Moreover, the base stations can optimize the data rate
of downlink, capacity and energy usage by relaying channel conditions inside the uplink
messages [5]. Therefore, all messages can be encrypted and by adopting the Viterbi algorithm,
the base stations can ensure the arrival of messages even with up to 50% packet error rate.

G. Dash7

The Dash7 Alliance Protocol (known as Dsah7, D7A, or D7AP) developed by Dash7
Alliance, is an open source protocol designed for wireless sensor network applications, which
operates on the 433 MHz, 868 MHz and 915 MHz unlicensed ISM bands [60][27]. Dash7 can
provide a battery life with multi-year, long range with up to 2 km, low latency for connecting
with other devices, data transfer with up to 167 kbit/s, a small open source protocol stack and
AES 128-bit shared key encryption support [4].

Fig. 14. DASH7 Alliance Protocol Architecture [4].

Compared with other LPWA technologies, Dash7 network consists of endpoints, sub-
controllers, and gateways. Gateways keep active continuously and are responsible for
collecting data from endpoints and relaying to the server. Sub-controllers act as the same role
with the gateways but are designed to operate at low-power and have sleep cycles. Dash7
uses a tree topology by default with an option to choose star layout without sub-controllers as
shown in Fig. 14. Endpoints send the data to a gateway (sub-controller) at any time and wake
up periodically to listen for downlink transmissions. Therefore, Dash7 can get much lower
latency for downlink communication than other LPWA technologies at the cost of higher
energy consumption. In addition, gateways also can query data from endpoints by building
the connection between the gateway and endpoints.

IV. COMPARISON BETWEEN DIFFERENT LPWA TECHNOLOGIES

In this section, we compare the key LPWA technologies introduced in Section III in terms of
different aspects, including frequency band, modulation, data rate, range, topology, numbers
of channels, MAC layer, proprietary aspect, packet size, nodes per gateway, deployment
model, encryption, roaming, security, forward error correction, distribute/centralized, and
founded year, as shown in Tables I and II. In order to make the difference in these LPWA
technologies clearly, we highlight some important aspects in details as follows.

TABLE I COMPARISON BETWEEN DIFFERENT KEY LPWA TECHNOLOGIES IN SECTION

III–PART I.

Weightless
Technology NB-IoT LoRa Weightless-
Weightless-W Weightless-P
N
Frequency 433/868/780/915
LET & GSM TV whitespace Sub 1 GHz Sub 1 GHz
band MHz
BPSK, QPSK, UNB, GMSK, offset-
Modulation QPSK CSS
DBPSK DBPSK QPSK
60 kbps (DL),
Data rate 50 kbps 10 Mbps 100 bps 100 kbps
50 kbps (UL)
2-5 km (urban), 10-15
Range 164 dB 5 km (urban) 5 km (urban) 5 km (urban)
km (rural)
Typically Star, Mesh
Topology Star Star Star Star
possible
10 in EUR, 64+8
Number of Multiple 16 or 24 Multiple 200 Multiple 12.5
(UL) and 8 (DL) in
channels channels channels (UL) Hz channels kHz channels
US, plus multiple SFs
CSMA/CA,
Slotted
MAC layer ALOHA with ALOHA-based TDMA/FDMA TDMA/FDMA
ALOHA
PCA
Proprietary Open
Full stack Physical layer Open standard Open standard
aspect standard
Packet size 2047 B 2047 B >10 B 20 B >10 B
Nodes per
52000 >1000000 N/A N/A N/A
gateway
Deployment Operator- Private and operator- Operator-
Operator-based Private
model based based based
3GPP (128-
Encryption AES 128 bit AES 128 bit AES 128 bit AES 128 bit
256 bit)
Roaming Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
In Fully
Security Fully addressed Fully addressed Fully addressed
development addressed
Forward error
Yes Yes Yes No Yes
correction
Distributed/
Centralized Centralized Distributed Distributed Distributed
Centralized
Founded 2016 2015 2012 2012 2012

Frequency band. NB-IoT is deployed within an LTE or GSM band, sharing their transmit
power at base stations with- out performance penalty. LoRa and Sigfox utilize unlicensed
ISM bands, where the former has 433/868/780/915 MHz bands available and only 868 or 915
MHz band is suitable for the latter. Both Telensa and Dash7 operate on sub 1 GHz, however,
there is an exception that Ingenu works on 2.4 GHz. Weightless technologies use different
bands. Weightless-W shares the bands with the TV whitespace spectrum, while the other two
Weightless technologies utilize sub 1 GHz. In this case, the same frequency band will be used
by different technologies, which will cause the interference between them. As a result, they
should consider the co-existence with different technologies by following some regulations to
avoid the interference [50].

TABLE II COMPARISON BETWEEN DIFFERENT KEY LPWA TECHNOLOGIES IN SECTION

III–PART II.
 Technology Sigfox Telensa Ingenu Dash7

Frequency
868/915 MHz Sub 1 GHz 2.4 GHz Sub 1 GHz
band
BPSK (UL),
Modulation UNB Spread-spectrum 2-(G) FSK
GFSK (DL)
Data rate 100 bps N/A 8 kbps 166.667 kbps
3-10 km (urban), 2-3 km (urban),
Range 4 km (urban) 0-5 km (urban)
20-50 km (rural) 4-10 km (rural)
Topology Star Star Star Star or tree
40 1MHz channels, up 3 different channel types
Number of
360 channels Multiple channels to 1200 signals per (number depends on type
channels
channel and region)
MAC layer ALOHA-based N/A RPMA-DSSS CSMA-CA-based
Proprietary Physical and
Full stack Full stack Open standard
aspect MAC layers
12 B (UL), 8 B
Packet size Max 65 kB Max 10 kB 256 B
(DL)
Nodes per
>1000000 5000 500000 N/A
gateway
Deployment
Operator-based Private Private Private
model
Encryption Not built in N/A AES-128 bit AES-CCM
Roaming Yes Yes Yes Yes
Partially
Security In development Fully addressed N/A
addressed
Forward error
No Yes Yes Yes
correction
Distributed/
Centralized Centralized Centralized Distributed
Centralized
Founded 2009 2005 2008, renamed 2015 2013

Modulation scheme. Due to the different features, these LPWA technologies have different
modulation schemes. For NB-IoT, QPSK modulation scheme is employed while CSS
modulation scheme is utilized to implement a bidirectional communication for LoRa. As for
Sigfox, uplink communication and downlink communication have different modulation
schemes, where the former uses BPSK modulation scheme and the latter adopts GFSK
modulation scheme. There are multiple modulation schemes employed in Weightless
technologies, such as BPSK and QPSK for Weightless-W, Ultra-Narrowband (UNB) and
BPSK for Weightless-N, and GMSK and offset-QPSK for Weightless-P. Telensa adopts a
proprietary UNB modulation technique and Ingenu uses Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum
(DSSS) for uplink communication, while Dash7 employs two-level GFSK modulation
scheme. Different modulation schemes have different impact on spread factors, which will
affect the transmission range and the efficiency of spectrum utilization [51].

MAC layer. As NB-IoT shares the same band with LTE or GSM, it supports conventional
CSMA/CA and ALOHA with Priority Channel Access (PCA) to provide a notion of quality
of service. Moreover, it adapts a centralized control to enable greater management of
scalability [29]. Both LoRa and Sigfox utilize ALOHA-based layers, which are energy
efficient to reduce control plane and enable asynchronous node. However, the ALOHA-based
layer cannot be deployed in a large scale because the number of nodes trying to transmit
increases simultaneously. As for Weightless technologies, both Weightless-W and
Weightless-P employ TDMA/FDMA protocols, while Weightless-N adapts slotted ALOHA
protocol. Dash7 supports CSMA/CA to check the channel periodically for possible downlink
transmissions and Ingenu utilizes RPMA-DSSS to provide bidirectional communication.

Deployment model. As illustrated in Tables I and II, NB- IoT, Sigfox, Weightless-W and
Weightless-N use operator- based deployed model, while Weightless-P, Telensa, Ingenu and
Dash7 use private deployed model. LoRa uses either operator-based deployed model or
private deployed model. Private deployed model is difficult to manage as there is no unique
regulation for controlling the limitations of duty cycle. The operator-based deployed model
shares an efficient regulation to enable the operator to know the limitation and then avoid the
interference between different technologies. As a result, LoRa with private model can be
deployed under the limited control from LoRa Alliance, while other technologies with
operator-based model are easy to be deployed simply as they have a existing regulation [30].

V. USE CASES OF LPWA

In this section, we discuss the use cases of LPWA technologies and analyze which LPWA
technology is suitable for a specific application domain.

Smart Metering Smart City/Building Manufacturing

Agriculture Retails and POS Supply Chain

Fig. 15. Applications of LPWA technologies [49].

There are usually four main considerations in IoT applications, namely cost, coverage,
latency, and battery life. Aiming at providing a low-cost communication with low power and
low data rate over a long distance, LPWA technologies have a huge application market,
which can benefit various domains, such as smart cities, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.
Specifically, they focus on the strong range and low energy consumption, but not the strong
throughput, which are particularly suitable for these applications that require to generate a
small data over a long period or to transfer little data over a long distance. However, for
many time-sensitive applications that require low latency, LPWA technologies cannot
guarantee a reliable communication for the necessary performance [49]. Together with some
cellular networks that provide low latency and high data rate, LPWA technologies play an
important role in IoT connectivity.
On the other hand, different applications have different requirements for communications. It
is essential to select an appropriate technology for a specific application to ensure an efficient
communication. Among different LPWA technologies, NB-IoT and LoRa occupy in 45% of
the commercial market. LoRa technology is already available on the market for a competitive
price, with more options already in development, while NB-IoT technology is new and filling
in the application domains that are not a good fit for LoRa. We compare these two
technologies in different application domains as shown in Fig. 15.

Smart metering. Most meters process a small data each day and do not have a strict latency
requirement. Therefore, LoRa with a low cost in deployment, is better than NB- IoT for these
applications. NB-IoT is a perfect choice for applications that require low latency and high
data throughput.

Smart city/buildings. As LoRa is easier to be replaced by gateways, it is a better choice for

most smart buildings. However, many buildings have their own electricity supplies and there
is no need to consider the efficiency of LoRa’s battery. Therefore NB-IoT may be a better
choice for smart buildings as it can provide high data throughput and low latency. Moreover,
NB-IoT is also a better option for smart city networks that include many buildings, while
LoRa is better for only one building application.

Manufacturing. There are many forms in the industrial automation and thus it is hard to say
which one is better. Specifically, NB-IoT is a better option for manufacturing applications
that require much more frequent communication and need to guarantee Quality of Service
(QoS), while LoRa is a better option for requiring lower cost and longer battery life. Both
NB-IoT and LoRa play an important role in this domain.

Agriculture. It is difficult to deploy a wide area cellular network, which makes LoRa a
significant advantage for this domain. Since LoRa does not rely on cellular network, it
operates well to monitor agricultural indicators, such as temperature, water usage, soil
situation, etc. These indicators do not shift rapidly and require a quick response. Moreover,
the low cost of LoRa end devices is another important advantage.

Retails and Point of Sales (POS). Retails and POS transactions require a quick response to
transmit a short data. As a result, NB-IoT is a better choice, as LoRa has a long latency time
causing a high risk of losing important sales.

Supply chain tracking. Compared with NB-IoT technology, LoRa technology is a

significant winner for supply chain and transportation applications as it performs well in the
state of motion. These applications do not need transmit too much data in shipments and
therefore the lower data rate and higher long battery life of LoRa will show up. Moreover,
LoRa also has an advantage over the coverage in rural warehouse area.

In a nutshell, both NB-IoT and LoRa have their own features to fulfill the different
requirements. The competition between them will promote the prosperity and development of
the market of LPWA technologies.

VI. CHALLENGES AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

LPWA designers are struggling to innovate solutions that can improve the performance of
current LPWA technologies. They focus on designing cheap devices and providing reliable
connectivity with low cost that can be deployed at a large scale. Many trade-offs should be
made to implement these functions, which brings a number of challenges, as shown in Fig. 16.
In this section, we discuss these challenges in the future development and analyze possible
solutions to address them.

Deploying massive Interference

numbers of end-devices control

Interoperability between
Localization of Challenges different LPWA
end-devices technologies

Authentication High data rate

and security modulation schemes

Fig. 16. Challenges in the future development of LPWA technologies.

A. Deploying massive numbers of end-devices

In the future, it is foreseeable that more than tens of millions of devices will be deployed to
support LPWA technologies. These devices transmit data at an unprecedented scale and share
wireless radio resources, which will cause severe re- source allocation problems. The density
of devices varies with different geographical areas, creating the hot-spot problems, which
will add burdens to the base stations.

Many studies have investigated whether LPWA technologies can support a large number of
end devices at a large scale [30] [21] [29]. These studies suggested that end devices should
adjust the communication parameters of LPWA technologies and exploit base station
diversity to overcome the problem. In the future, we can explore some possible solutions to
this problem, including using the channel diversity, opportunistic spectrum access, and
adaptive transmission strategies. More- over, we also should improve the existing MAC
protocols to scale LPWA technologies for massive devices transmitting data [38] [53].

B. Interference control

Because the number of connected devices will present a process of exponential increase, the
interference (cross- technology interference and self-interference) between de- vices will
become a severe problem. The interference has a possible negative effect on coverage and
capacity of LPWA technologies. What’s more, some LPWA technologies which adopt simple
ALOHA-based schemes will cause performance deterioration with high interference [37]
[30].

For these massive number of devices, how to reduce the interference and utilize the sharing
spectrum efficiently are the most key challenges. Because the interference varies with time,
space, and frequency, it is essential for devices to adapt efficient schedules to reduce the
interference and keep reliable connectivity at the most extent. Physical and MAC layers also
can make use of this diversity to help deploy the devices at a large scale. Moreover,
regulatory authorities also should set some rules to enable efficient spectrum sharing [18].
C. Interoperability between different LPWA technologies

With an efficient deployment strategy, it is possible that different LPWA technologies can
co-exist in the future. As a result, how to ensure interoperability between these diversity
technologies is a crucial challenge to promote the development of LPWA technologies.
However, there is little work sup- porting interoperability between different technologies.
Some standards of LPWA technologies, such as IEEE, 3GPP, etc. can cooperate to innovate a
new standard for addressing the interoperability [26].

We also explore two possible solutions to the problem. First, because short range wireless
devices can connect with each other through IP but LPWA technologies limit a direct
communication with the same IP, we can adapt alternative solutions based on gateways or
backend to implement interoperability between different LPWA technologies. Second, we
can exploit IoT middleware and virtualization technologies to provide connectivity between
different LPWA devices. However, interoperability still remains an open challenge as there is
no testbed and tool available to evaluate the performance of interoperability.

D. High data rate modulation schemes

LPWA technologies achieve long distances communication at the expense of data rate. Some
LPWA technologies offer very low data rates and short packet sizes (as shown in Tables I
and II), which limit their potential application domains. With the number of connected
devices increasing exponentially, the requirement for high data rate and big packet sizes
becomes more and more important. To cater to this requirement, it is essential to design
multiple modulation schemes for ensuring the high-quality communication [35]. According
to different situations, devices can switch between different modulation schemes to provide
long range, high data rate and high energy efficiency simultaneously.

To implement this function, we need to redesign an in- expensive hardware with a flexible
architecture that supports multiple physical layers. Each layer can offer a trade-off between
the range and data rate to meet the requirements of different situations.

E. Authentication and security

In a communication system, authentication and security problems are important factors to

evaluate the efficiency of the system [19]. For cellular networks, authentication and security
are addressed based on Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM) to guarantee QoS. However, in
LPWA networks, due to the low cost and energy considerations, there are only simple
communication protocols utilized without SIM-based authentication. As a result, providing
efficient authentication for LPWA technologies is required for improving the quality of
communication. Moreover, it is also easy for devices without authentication to leak the
private data causing the security problem. In the future, we should further investigate robust
and low power mechanisms for authentication and security in LPWA networks.

F. Localization of end-devices

As shown in Section V, LPWA techniques can be applied in many application domains,

including supply chain management, smart city applications. These applications may require
the location of objects to provide a better service. For example, an accurate localization is
important for monitoring the behaviors of objects, such as vehicle, shipments, etc. In the
future, it also contributes to the birth of new applications.

There are various methods to improve the accuracy of localization using the properties of
received signals [32] or fingerprint-based approaches [34]. All these methods require
accurate time synchronization and deploying sufficient base stations to ensure the accuracy,
which is rather easily achieved in a short-range wireless network. However, it is difficult for
LPWA networks as they have a limited channel bandwidth and aim at low cost and low
power. Moreover, the signals between end devices and base stations often suffer the
interference causing a very large localization error [36]. Therefore, it is a real challenge to
ensure an accurate localization with the signal of LPWA transceivers only. New technologies
exploiting physical layer properties or combining with other existing localization schemes
should be proposed to address this challenge for extending the application domains of LPWA
technologies [62].

VII. CONCLUSION

LPWA technologies provide long range and low-cost communication at the expense of low
data rate. In this paper, we review the wireless communication approaches in IoT and
introduce the definition and design goals of LPWA technologies. By investigating different
LPWA technologies, we evaluate their features in terms of different aspects, such as
frequency band, modulation schemes, data rate, etc. Then we explore the common use cases
of LPWA technologies and show how to select the appropriate technology for the specific
application domain. Finally, we discuss the challenges in making trade-offs between different
features and propose possible solutions to address them in the future.

VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61572060,
61772060, 61602024), the Academic Excellence Foundation of BUAA for PhD Students, and
CERNET Innovation Project (NGII20160316, NGII20170315).

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 Fei Gu received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Beihang

University in 2019 and the MS degree in the same major from

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2014. Now

he is assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and

Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. He was a

joint PhD student in the School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal,

QC, Canada from Dec. 2017 to Dec. 2018. His research focuses on sensor network,

healthcare system, data mining and so on.

Jianwei Niu received his Ph.D. degree in 2002 in computer science

from Beihang University. He was a visiting scholar at School of

Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA from Jan.

2010 to Feb. 2011. He is a professor in the School of Computer

Science and Engineering, Beihang University. He is now an IEEE

senior member. He received the New Century Excellent Researcher Award from

Ministry of Education of China 2009, the first prize of technical invention of the

Ministry of Education of China 2012. His current research interests include mobile

and pervasive computing, mobile video analysis.

Landu Jiang received PhD degree in the School of Computer

Science at McGill University. He received his MSc in Computer

Science from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2012. Besides his

MSc, he is carrying out a Master degree (minor) in Construction

Management. Previously, He received his BEng in Information

Security Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010. His research
interests are in computer vision, machine learning, smart sensing, wearable and

mobile Computing, cyber-physical systems, green energy solutions, and online social

networks.
 Xue Liu received the BS degree in mathematics and MS degree in

automatic control both from Tsinghua University, China, and the

PhD degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He is an associate professor and

William Dawson scholar in the School of Computer Science,

McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada. He was also the Samuel R. Thompson

associate professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and HP Labs in Palo Alto,

California. His research interests include computer networks and communications,

smart grid, real-time and embedded systems, cyber-physical systems, data centers,

and software reliability. He has been granted one US patent and filed four other US

patents, and published more than 150 research papers in major peer-reviewed

international journals and conference proceedings, including the Year 2008 Best Paper

Award from the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and the First Place Best

Paper Award of the ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec 2011).

He is a member of the ACM.

Mohammed Atiquzzaman received the MS and PhD degrees in

electrical engineering and electronics from the University of

Manchester, United Kingdom. He currently holds the Edith Kinney

Gaylord Presidential professorship in the School of Computer

Science at the University of Oklahoma. He is the editor-in-chief of

Journal of Networks and Computer Applications, founding editor-in-chief of

Vehicular Communications and has served/serving on the editorial boards of various

IEEE journals and co-chaired numerous IEEE international conferences including

IEEE Globecom. His research interests are in communications switching, transport

protocols, wireless and mobile networks, satellite networks, and optical

communications. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

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Fei Gu, Jianwei Niu, Landu Jiang, Xue Liu, Mohammed Atiquzzaman