Cutting Edge

In this post, we try to talk about the fundamentals of LoRaWAN. LoRa is a wireless modulation technique. It is a physical layer implementation. This is derived from Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) technology. It encodes information on radio waves using chirp pulses. This is similar to the way that bats and dolphins communicate. This makes the modulated transmission resilient to disturbances and travel great distances. This makes it resilient to background disturbances. LoRa appliances use the ALOHA protocol, which means that they can wake up when needed LoRa is ideal for applications that transmit small chunks of data with low bit rates. Data can be transmitted at a longer range compared to technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, or ZigBee. These features make LoRa well-suited for sensors and actuators that operate in low-power mode. Internationally there are frequencies reserved for Industrial, Scientific, and Medical purposes called ISM Bands. It can also operate on the sub gigahertz, license-free spectrum, and 2.4GHZ LoRaWAN is a MAC (Media Access Control layer) protocol built on top of LoRa modulation. It defines how the devices use the LoRa hardware when they transmit and format messages. LoRaWAN is suitable for transmitting small-size payloads over large distances. They provide a significant communication range with low bandwidths over large distances. LoRaWAN is pretty useful because There are multiple use cases that can be constructed with LoRaWAN, these include Certification provided by LoRaWAN alliance – The LoRa Alliance provides LoRaWAN certification for end devices. Certified end devices provide users with confidence that the end device is reliable and compliant with the LoRaWAN specification.  LoRaWAN architecture The LoRaWAN network is deployed in a star-of-stars topology. See below It typically consists of the elements that will be found in any IoT architecture i.e. end devices, gateways, application services, and the network. LoRaWAN networks use an ALOHA-based protocol, so end devices don’t need to peer with specific gateways. Messages sent from end devices travel through all gateways within range. These messages are received by the Network Server. If the Network Server has received multiple copies of the same message, it keeps a single copy of the message and discards others. This is known as message deduplication.