Survey of data exchange formats for heterogeneous LPWAN-satellite IoT networks

This paper discusses data interchange formats in the context of heterogeneous networks for the Internet of Things (IoT). The wide dissemination of IoT technologies into various industries, such as agriculture and mining, reveals data transfer issues in geographically remote locations due to absence of any network infrastructure. Several technologies like LoraWAN and NB-IOT offer extended communication ranges, however they still cannot fully solve the problem. In many cases satellite networks are the only available option for transmitting IoT data to a central collection point. Our research of satellite networks showed that as of today the Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) network is one of the best technologies suited for IoT applications. However, the SBD imposes a significant limit on the size of transmitted messages, which turns data format selection into a vitally important task. We developed a simulation model as well as a heterogeneous Iridium-LoRAWAN prototype to compare different data exchange formats. Our experiments showed more than 4 times increase in the amount of data transferred with Protocol Buffers, compared to the widely used JSON format.