Survey and Performance Study of Emerging LPWAN Technologies for IoT Applications

Energy efficiency and scalability continue to be key considerations for the development of low cost wireless networks for meeting the needs of the emerging world of Internet of Things (IoT). Recent developments in low power wide area networks (LPWAN) promise to meet these requirements by achieving long communication ranges at low data rates without increasing the energy cost. Consequently, LPWANs are rapidly gaining prominence in the development of IoT networks in comparison to legacy WLANs that use multihop mesh networking for increasing connectivity and coverage. Inspired by this trend, we review and evaluate various recently developed LPWAN technologies and present key performance measures of LoRa (Long Range), which is a leading LPWAN technology.