A Study of Low Power Wide Area Network Solutions for IoT Applications

With the expansion in the world of Internet of Things (IoT), the number of networked devices in IoT is also increasing. Consequently, connectivity requirements (e.g., energy efficiency, cost deployment, scalability etc.) are also budding rapidly to ensure effective communication between these devices. The recent developments in the emerging IoT technology i.e., Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technology promise to meet these requirements. This paper will introduce the emerging LPWAN technology followed by the requirements and its specifications. Furthermore, its representatives such as LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT will be introduced of which characteristics, topology and some significant techniques are inspected. The following techniques are compared together in a frequency spectrum to detect risk bands causing collisions. The main contribution of this paper is a summary of characteristics, which influence the resulting coexistence.