Survey on Low Power Wide Area Networks in IoT

Communication technologies, aimed at providing effective wireless communication, form one of the cornerstones of the wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT). Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) wireless communication technologies are particularly suited for implementation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication in usage contexts where low data rate and low device mobility are frequently combined with a requirement for (extremely) low-power consumption and long range. In this paper, we identify the main objectives put in front of the LPWA technologies. We follow by describing how those objectives are met in the three most widespread LPWA technologies today: NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, and Sigfox. The usability of the described technologies is summarized for different contexts, based on use-case scenarios from different IoT application domains.