Data Flow in Low-Power Wide-Area IoT Applications

Emerging new technologies have brought a paradigm shift to the world of wireless sensor networks. Whereas in the previous decade the majority of research effort was focused on “traditional” multi-hop ad-hoc networking due to the underlying low-power (and consequently short-range) communication, the emergence of long-range low-power wireless technologies such as LoRaWAN and NB-IoT changed the way we think about the massive scale M2M networking. Consequently, a change to the rules and the philosophy introduced a new scope of problems and challenges, when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, as well as their integration into a broader IoT ecosystem. In this paper, we give an overview of the various ways to establish reliable and secure data path between wireless sensor nodes on one side, and web-or cloud-based IoT applications on the other side.