Advantages of LPWAN | disadvantages of LPWAN
This page covers advantages and disadvantages of LPWAN and its basics. It mentions benefits or advantages of LPWAN and drawbacks or disadvantages of LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network).
What is LPWAN?
Introduction:
LPWAN stands for Low Power Wide Area Network. It is a type of wireless network used for low power
IoT and M2M applications. LPWAN is a low power WAN system which offers long range communications among
connected things or sensors having long life. Following is the tree of LPWAN standards with their developing
organizations.
LPWAN is used for different applications such as smart metering, smart parking, smart grid control, smart security, Smart city, smart agriculture, asset tracking, smart home automation, critical infrastructure monitoring, personal IoT applications, logistics and so on.
Following are the list of LPWAN technologies with links on their basic features.
• NB-Fi
• DASH7
• SIGFOX
• LORA
• EC-GSM
• NB-IoT
• LTE-M
• Weightless
Refer LPWAN tutorial >> to understand basic components used in LPWAN network architecture.
Benefits or advantages of LPWAN
Following are the benefits or advantages of LPWAN:
➨The LPWAN network offers longer range from 5 Km to 30 Km.
➨The LPWAN devices will consume low power and hence they offer longer life time (Approx. 10 years).
➨The LPWAN devices (i.e. sensors) and gateways are lower in cost.
➨The LPWAN network requires few number of APs (i.e. BSs or Gateways) to cover larger distances
across the city or country.
➨The use of sub GHz frequency band in LPWAN makes the system robust to operate under
complex channel environments.
➨The LPWAN signal offers high amount of penetration through walls and building basements.
➨It offers simple network installation and easy network management due to smart architecture.
➨It offers secured data communication between nodes and Gateways due to use of encryption algorithms.
Drawbacks or disadvantages of LPWAN
Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of LPWAN:
➨LPWAN supports low data rate, hence LPWAN can not be used for high data rate applications.
➨It offers high latency between end to end nodes. Hence LPWAN is not ideal for
low latency applications.
➨Refer disadvantages of respective LPWAN technologies for more information.
Conclusion: LPWAN technologies include NB-Fi, LoRa, EC-GSM, NB-IoT, LTE-M, NB-IoT, Sigfox and Zigbee. One need to understand benefits and limitations of all these technologies in order to understand advantages of LPWAN and disadvantages of LPWAN.
Advantages and Disadvantages of other Sensor Types
Advantages and Disadvantages of other wireless technologies
What is Difference between
difference between OFDM and OFDMA
Difference between SC-FDMA and OFDM
Difference between SISO and MIMO
Difference between TDD and FDD
FDMA vs TDMA vs CDMA
FDM vs TDM
CDMA vs GSM