Low Power Wide Area Network to make data travel around the city

There are several LPWAN protocols to consider. When choosing the technology to use, it is necessary to take into account the operating range, regularity of communication, latency levels, QoS and power efficiency.

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smart city LPWAN

With hundreds of millions of people flooding into urban areas in the coming decades, the demands on local services and the speed at which available resources will be exploited will increase and put existing infrastructures to the test: in the scenario described, wireless technologies will guarantee significant advantages over wired technologies, particularly with the adoption of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology.

As Koichi Sorada and Pawan Jalagar, Product Manager and Product Engineer IoT & Connectivity Modules at Murata, explain. Murata "In the near future, municipalities, utilities and commercial enterprises will use data to ensure their operations are running smoothly and to react faster when critical situations arise. Once acquired from a multitude of distributed nodes, which will often be located remotely, the data must be transported as efficiently as possible. Because there are so many different LPWAN protocols to consider, a number of parameters including operating range, regularity of communication, latency levels, QoS and power efficiency must be taken into account when choosing which technology to use.

The main LPWAN protocols are Sigfox, LoRa, and LTE Cat NB1and Cat-M1 cellular networks. Sigfox uses the ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) band and is a proprietary wireless technology; it is a network particularly suitable for fleet management and logistics applications, but its use in the context of a "smart" city is limited to a few real cases. LoRa also operates in the ISM band and uses the same frequencies as Sigfox, but is preferred to the latter due to its bi-directional operation, higher capacity and integration of AES encryption with a 128-bit key (AES-128), and has been the basis of many installations in the smart city context: utilities, "smart" parking, water quality monitoring, waste management often rely on this network. LTE Cat NB1, or Narrowband IoT, derives from 4G LTE mobile technology and can coexist with 2G, 3G and 4G mobile networks, while Cat-M is entirely LTE-based, has a higher data transfer rate, lower latency but higher costs and consumption compared to NB-IoT.

As far as hardware is concerned, any form of wireless implementation for Smart Cities will have to comply with very strict constraints in terms of consumption and guarantee a battery life of ten (or even more) years. Sorada and Jalagar go on to say: "Compactness and scalability are two other important requirements: the first because it allows for hardware upgrades in existing infrastructures, the second because in many applications it is necessary to integrate a large number of nodes within a system and the availability of a hardware and software solution that simplifies the task is an added value.

 

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