Challenges and Experiment with LoRaWAN

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) or (LPWA) is a type of wireless telecommunication network designed to allow long range communications at a low bit rate among things (connected objects), such as sensors operated on a battery. The characteristics of extremely long communication range and low power provide more feasible, reasonable wireless connectivity with a lot of researchers, field engineers, and application designers, who have suffered from weak wireless connectivity, range limitations, and energy efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, key applications and challenges of LPWA will be handled first, and several existing (emerging) new LPWA standards will be discussed. In particular, LoRaWAN, which is regarded as one of the most effective LPWA solutions, is mainly focused. So, several functionalities and characteristics of LoRaWAN will be presented. In addition, network architecture different from legacy short range wireless communications such as IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11, etc., will be overviewed and state-of-the-art off-the-shelf LoRa chipsets and modules will be introduced. Then, in order to help understand how to develop LoRaWAN application, our LoRaWAN experiments will be presented. At the end of the keynote, design considerations of LoRaWAN application and network, and several types of design methodologies will be discussed.