In order to help you find your way around the IoT and IIoT universe and news, we will explain to you on this page what LPWAN is .
A characteristic of wireless network
LPWAN is the acronym for Low Power Wide Area Network . We also invariably also find LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) or LPN (Low Power Network).
So as you will understand from the acronyms, LPWAN characterizes all wireless networks, long range and low consumption .
Broadly speaking, this type of mobile network has characteristics which for the most part meet these points:
Offer very good penetration (wall, building, factories, etc.)
Data can be transported over gigantic distances, up to 50km for some of them.
The power required to consume this network, that is to say to send and receive data, is very low.
So in this context, you will undoubtedly have noticed it, we are not talking about flow, speed, etc ...
In what framework?
With the advent of industry 4.0 and particularly the technological revolution linked to the IoT, many connected objects have emerged.
These objects are mostly small or even tiny and therefore cannot carry a lot of computing power or a large battery capacity. Also, as they are small, we tend to position them anywhere or to move them easily. They are connected objects, but they must communicate with the Internet network, otherwise their interest is immediately lower.
Therefore we understand why these LPWAN networks arrived. They are there to answer the physical issues of these objects.
What are LPWAN networks?
Today there are several LPWAN networks. They do not all have the same characteristics and therefore do not all meet the same needs. Some are based on the current GSM infrastructure and others are in the process of being deployed.
For the main ones, there are two main categories of networks:
Private LPWAN networks
Public LPWAN networks
In the private sector, there are mainly 2: Sigfox and LoRaWan . These two solutions require relying on a network of private antennas or on a private infrastructure.
In the public domain we find more NB-IoT and LTE-M . These protocols are based on existing 4G technologies and are 5G compatible . They therefore have the advantage of mainly requiring only a software implementation and very little hardware to be deployed.
In USA NB-IoT and LTE-M are being deployed at the time of writing. 5G is in a very advanced state but not yet accessible. As for Sigfox and LoRa, they are sleeping and already widely used around the world.
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