Internet of Mobile Things: Overview of LoRaWAN, DASH7, and NB-IoT in LPWANs Standards and Supported Mobility

Abstract

Low-power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) constitute a type of networks which is used to connect things to the Internet from a wide variety of sectors. These types of technologies provide the Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the ability to transmit few bytes of data for long ranges, taking into consideration minimum power consumption. In parallel, IoT applications will cover a wide range of human and life needs from smart environments (cities, home, transportation etc.) to health and quality of life. Among these popular LPWANs technologies, we have identified the unlicensed frequency band (LoRa, DASH7, SigFox, Wi-SUN, etc.), and the licensed frequency band standards (NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M, EC-GSM-IoT, etc.). In general, both types of standards only consider fixed interconnected things, and less attention has been provided to the mobility of the things or devices. In this paper, we address the mobility of the things and the connectivity in each of the three LPWAN standards: LoRaWAN, DASH7, and NB-IoT. In particular, we show how the mobility of things can be achieved when transmitting and receiving data. Then, we provide a general and technical comparison for the three standards. Finally, we illustrate several application scenarios where the mobility is required, and we show how to select the most suited standard. We also discuss the research challenges and perspectives.

IoT Connectivity Technologies and Applications: A Survey

“…Thanks to the usage of the unlicensed band, the unlicensed LPWAN providers do not necessarily pay for spectrum licensing, as a result it reduces the cost of deployments. For the unlicensed LPWAN, LoRa and Sigfox are the two biggest competitors [104], [105]. 1) LoRa: LoRa, stands for Long Range.…”

A Spatiotemporal Model for Peak AoI in Uplink IoT Networks: Time Versus Event-Triggered Traffic

“…While the aforementioned works characterize the AoI at the microscopic device level, they overlook the macroscopic impact of aggregate network interference between multiple devices. In the foreseen massively loaded IoT networks, the mutual interference between the active transmitters, trying to utilize the set of finite resources, might hinder timely updates of a given link of interest [24]. In the context of large-scale networks, stochastic geometry is a mathematical tool that is is employed to characterize performance when accounting for mutual interference within the network [25]- [27].…”

“…The term ω is the spectral radius of R, which can be evaluated by solving for z in z = s(I T − A 1,n − zA 2,n ) −1 I T . In addition, (24) must satisfy the normalization x 0,n 1 T + x 1,n (I T − R n ) −1 ]1 T = 1.…”

SCHC-Based Solution for Roaming in LoRaWAN

“…LoRaWAN is an open standard architecture developed by LoRa Alliance [2] to provide a medium access control mechanism and enable End-Devices (ED) to communicate with one or more gateways (GW). A GW is seamless to an ED, where an ED sends data when available without considering location change, movement, and speed of motion.…”

“…This static context defines the compression and decompression rules of the headers. The SCHC framework is compatible with LoRaWAN v1.0 [2] but not with LoRaWAN v1.1 that supports roaming of devices during mobility between different LoRaWAN operators. During roaming, the header values of the protocol stack change and are no longer static.…”