All posts tagged: lora

With the growing interest in low-power wide-area wireless networks for Internet-of-Things and M2M applications, Microchip Technology has been rolling out a number of wireless solutions based on radio technologies such as LoRa – addressing requirements such as long-range connectivity, strong energy efficiency for long battery life, and low hardware cost to enable high-volume deployments.

LoRa is a wireless technology developed by Semtech Corporation, which utilises spread-spectrum modulation in sub-gigahertz UHF bands to enable wireless network connectivity over very long distances, with ranges on the order of 10 kilometres. This allows for extremely strong energy efficiency enabling wireless end-nodes that can operate on battery power for up to 10 years. LoRa networks also offer very high network capacity, with up to a million network nodes, high robustness, and localisation capability.

LoRa radio technology is ideally suited for battery-operated sensors, smart-city technologies, home and building automation, smart agriculture, wireless sensor networks, industrial automation technologies, and other similar M2M and Internet-of-Things applications where efficient battery use is important and network nodes may be separated over wide areas.

Microchip’s LoRa technology solutions are long-range, low-power solutions for network end nodes in IoT or M2M applications, and they’re ready to run out-of-the-box, with easy setup and configuration.

With the complete LoRaWAN protocol and RF regulatory certifications such as FCC certification provided for their modules, Microchip’s LoRa modules and solutions reduce time-to-market and reduce development costs for your connected, wireless products.

The LoRaWAN protocol is a low-power, wide-area networking (LPWAN) specification which complements LoRa technology, particularly aimed at wireless, battery-operated devices in regional, national or global networks.

LoRaWAN aims to address key requirements of M2M and Internet-of-Things applications, such as bidirectional communication, mobility, strong security, and localisation services.

The LoRaWAN protocol implements several layers of security features to ensure a high level of encryption and security is maintained across the entire embedded network. For example, a unique network session key ensures security at the network server level and a separate application session key, which is unique and also specific to a given end-node device, provides an extra layer of security at the application server level.

LoRaWAN aims to provide seamless interoperability between smart, LoRa-networked IoT “things” of different types, from different manufacturers, without the need for complex local installations.

Along with its advantages in long-range connectivity and power efficiency, this is just one of the ways that LoRa and LoRaWAN technology is aimed at further enabling the Internet of Things.

Microchip’s LoRa modules and transceiver solutions aim to provide a flexible, cost-effective platform for the creation of powerful wireless IoT solutions and products to meet customers’ needs.

Although these LoRa solutions from Microchip can be used alongside microcontrollers and components from other vendors, these devices and their supporting software examples and documentation are designed to be particularly complementary to Microchip’s popular PIC microcontrollers.

Microchip helps make it easy to build LoRa networks by providing almost-complete end-device modules that are certified for FCC and similar RF regulatory agencies. These LoRaWAN-equipped modules make it easy to connect to any LoRa Alliance certified gateway, from Actility, Cisco or Kirlink for example, and to connect to LoRa network services such as those provided by Actility or IBM.

The Microchip RN2483 LoRa module is a compact surface-mounted module which provides a built-in microcontroller, 14 GPIO pins, onboard ADC, a serial EEPROM for 64-bit MAC addressing, and the analog front end and RF matching transceiver for the transceiver.

These features integrated into the hardware module mean that an additional microcontroller may not be needed in many applications, and that no special RF design or layout expertise is needed to get you started building and deploying LoRa networks and products.

The LoRa radio in the RN2483 operates in the sub-gigahertz spectrum at either 433 MHz or 868MHz, making it compatible with different spectrum requirements across all international markets. These LoRa transceivers feature a very strong receive sensitivity of -148dBm, enabling connectivity over extremely long distances, and forward error correction is also implemented, helping to improve immunity to interference.

A unique spread-spectrum modulation scheme is used, helping to enable maximum range and maximum network capacity with minimum power consumption.

The RN2483 implements the LoRaWAN Class A protocol, enabling seamless connectivity to any LoRaWAN-compliant network infrastructure, whether public or privately deployed. It is the first LoRa module on the market to pass certification testing from the LoRa Alliance.

This module is specifically designed to make it easy to get started, accelerating your development and time to market. It is certified to the LoRaWAN 1.0 specification, ensuring that designers can quickly and easily integrate their edge-node devices into any LoRaWAN 1.0 compliant LoRaWAN network.

And this is where the LX Group us ready to work with you. We have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in IoT embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Continuing on from our previous article explaining the LoRa Alliance, we’re now excited about the final LoRaWAN revision 1.0 specification that has recently been formally released to the public by the LoRa Alliance – and is available to download freely from their website. This release makes LoRaWAN the most comprehensive and the most widely adopted Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification presently available for open use.

The LoRaWAN specification is the first public and open carrier-grade LPWAN protocol standard, aimed at wide-area networks of sensors, base stations and servers, or any wide-area Internet-of-Things or M2M networking applications.

This specification has been created by the LoRa Alliance, an open, non-profit consortium led by IBM, Actility, Microchip and Semtech, who believe that the Internet-of-Things era is already well and truly established, who have a mission to standardise LPWAN deployments around the world that enable wide-area connectivity for IoT and machine-to-machine, smart city and industrial telemetry applications.

As a part of IBM’s support of the LoRa Alliance, IBM has released their “LoRaWAN in C” reference implementation of the specification as open source under the Eclipse Public License.

The LoRa Alliance and its members, which include many industry leaders in the mobile network and IoT sectors, see the release of this standard as a significant step towards international standardisation and interoperability in the LPWAN space.

This will stimulate the deployment of network infrastructure and certified sensor hardware products from many manufacturers and vendors around the world – all using a unified and interoperable standard. According to the Alliance, they are delighted to have achieved this milestone of opening the LoRaWAN specification to the general public.

The members of the LoRa Alliance have collaborated, sharing their knowledge and experience, to build and rigorously test the LoRaWAN R1.0 release specification to ensure its best possible readiness for large-scale deployments across the entire spectrum of different LPWAN use cases.

The LoRa Alliance hopes that this careful implementation of the LoRaWAN open standard will drive the global success of LPWAN technology, particularly in Internet-of-Things and M2M ecosystems, and it will help to guarantee interoperability around one open, carrier-grade, global specification.

The Alliance is a strong believer in open standards, rather than proprietary, closed specifications, which enable cooperation between the key stakeholders in the LPWAN and Internet-of-Things sectors, including mobile network operators, sensor and connected device manufacturers, and end users as well. They believe that open ecosystems are critical to encourage the widespread adoption of low-cost, long-range machine-to-machine connectivity.

Having industry leaders, vendors, service providers and users involved in the development and improvement of the standard has ensured that all of their shared knowledge and experiences are included and addressed most effectively by the specification.

The aim is ultimately that LoRaWAN will be the best placed standard to benefit the LoRa community, and the LPWAN IoT industry more generally.

LoRaWAN is an ideal framework for LPWAN applications that require very strong energy efficiency, providing telecom-grade connectivity and managed, secure, bidirectional communications as well as location-enabled services, all with hardware that can run from a single coin cell battery.

Furthermore, LoRaWAN is optimised for strong energy efficiency and support for large networks of up to millions of devices in regional, national or even international wide-area networks. It is specifically aimed at supporting low-cost, secure, bidirectional wireless communications with portable devices across wide areas while keeping both the battery costs and base station infrastructure costs to a minimum.

With the wide-area capabilities of the LoRaWAN specification, entire cities or countries can be connected using a relatively small number of base stations, meaning that the up-front rollout of thousands of base station nodes is not needed as would be required with traditional mesh networks. This makes wide-area IoT solutions much more accessible, with reduced infrastructure costs.

LoRaWAN technology can be used alongside the more common cellular M2M technology in a complementary way – although cellular networks require shorter distances to each base station and have higher power requirements, they can also offer more bandwidth for those applications and devices in the network where this bandwidth is required.

The LoRAWAN specification aims to make it easy to develop LPWAN services and applications, and to address the challenges of deploying and operating a LPWA network across a large geographic area – even as large as a whole country.

Its features are specifically aimed at supporting low-cost, secure, mobile and bidirectional communication for wireless IoT applications, with strong energy efficiency and a minimal need for base station deployments.

Here at the LX Group we have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

The LoRa Alliance is an open, non-profit, international alliance of companies and industry stakeholders that share the mission of trying to standardise the deployment of the Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) – that are increasingly being deployed around the world to enable Internet-of-Things technology and machine-to-machine communications, “smart cities”, and industrial applications.

Members of the LoRa alliance collaborate with the aim of driving the global success of their LoRaWAN protocol, by sharing knowledge and experience with a view towards interoperability between operators, using a single open global standard for LPWAN connectivity. The Alliance – which is led by IBM, Actility, Semtech and Microchip, formally released the open LoRaWAN R1.0 standard to the public earlier this year.

LoRaWAN is an LPWAN specification intended for wireless, battery-operated IoT “things” with wide-area network connectivity. Its features are specifically aimed at supporting low-cost, secure, mobile and bidirectional communication for wireless IoT applications, with strong energy efficiency and a minimal need for base station deployments.

A LoRa network is already being rolled out by Bouygues Telecom in France, in partnership with Sagemcom, with aims to cover most of the country by the first half of 2016. Some testing and evaluation is already underway with this country-scale LoRaWAN network, and tests are also being conducted locally in Sydney’s North Shore area by the NNN (National Narrowband Network) Company.

LoRaWAN is optimised for strong energy efficiency and support for large networks of up to millions of devices. At the physical layer, the RF hardware is optimised for high efficiency, with data links being maintained over long distances with very low power consumption.

As with some other LPWAN systems such as Taggle, the class-licensed sub-gigahertz ISM bands are used to provide this long-range connectivity – different frequencies depending on which country the technology is deployed in.

This long range and energy efficiency comes at the cost of data rate, though – this technology was never intended for high-bandwidth applications, but it is a perfect fit for lightweight applications such as telemetry from environmental sensors deployed in remote field applications.

LoRaWAN network architecture is typically laid out in a “star-of-stars” topology with multiple endpoints and multiple gateways. In this arrangement each gateway serves as a transparent bridge that relays messages between endpoint devices and a central back-end server. Gateways are connected to the back-end server via familiar IP networks while endpoint “things” use a single-hop lightweight wireless link back to one or more gateway devices.

Wireless communication between the endpoint devices and the gateways is performed in a spread-spectrum manner, employing different frequency channels and data rates. The selection of the data rate is a trade-off between the required transmission range and the acceptable time for the transmission of a message of given size, with typical LoRaWAN data rates ranging from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps.

This may seem small, but it is sufficient for a lightweight, embedded sensor application that transmits small packets of sensor readings occasionally to the back-end server.

Because of the spread-spectrum approach, communications with different data rates do not interfere with each other, but instead what you have, basically, is a set of “virtual” channels for each transmission at a different data rate. In this manner, the capacity of each gateway is increased, and more endpoint devices are able to be supported by each gateway. This means that the infrastructure cost of rolling out a large-scale LoRaWAN network is reduced.

To maximise both battery life of the endpoint devices and the overall capacity of the network, the LoRaWAN network server is responsible for an adaptive data rate (ADR) scheme that dynamically manages the data rate and the RF power output for each individual endpoint node in the network.

The LoRaWAN standard defines three classes of endpoint nodes – one that allows a small downlink window after each upload, which means that devices don’t have to communicate a scheduled downlink window in cases where the amount of downlink data needed is minimal; or one that allows a scheduled downlink slot at a defined time; or one that listens for downlink messages at any time.

The latter is more flexible, but because it requires the radio receiver to be kept online listening for new downlink messages all the time, this is the most power-inefficient mode compared to the former scenarios where the radio can be powered down. This is another way that the LoRaWAN protocol helps to maintain strong power efficiency in the endpoint devices.

The LoRa Alliance Certified Product program ensures that any LoRa-branded devices on the market are compliant with the standard, are interoperable, and meet regulatory requirements such as the radio frequencies being used. Only LoRa Alliance authorised test houses may perform testing for this program, and the relevant national conformity test reports are supplied by product designers, together with the LoRa Alliance conformity report, to the Alliance’s certification body before the “LoRa Certified Product” status is allowed.

This strict process gives consumers confidence in the LoRa Alliance and in consumer-facing products that carry their brand, meaning that consumers without a technical background can be confident that their products are interoperable, compliant with relevant radio regulations, and can be used in a predictable way alongside other devices and software tools that are built on top of the same open standards.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.