Hackaday has an article summarizing how LoRaWAN works, using home appliances as an example. LoRaWAN is a proprietary, bidirectional, RF broadcasting technology with very low data capacity. It can have a range of around 10 kilometers yet is low power enough to be feasible to use on embedded devices. It competes against the DASH7, Sigfox, and NB-IoT protocols.
While wireless communications are unquestionably useful in projects, common wireless protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth peter out after only a number of meters, which is annoying when your project is installed in the middle of nowhere. Moving to an LTE-based or similar mobile solution can help with the range, but this does not help when there's poor cell coverage, and it tends to use more power. Fortunately, for low-bitrate, low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) like e.g. sensor networks, there's a common solution in the form of LoRaWAN, as in long-range wide area network (WAN).
The proprietary LoRa RF modulation technique that underlies LoRaWAN is based on Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). This modulation technique is highly resistant to channel noise and fading as well as Doppler shift, enabling it to transmit using relatively low power for long distances. LoRaWAN builds on top of the physical layer provided by LoRa to then create the protocol that devices can then use to communicate with other LoRa devices.
Courtesy of global LoRaWAN gateway and software providers such as The Things Industries and ThingSpeak, it's possible even as a hobbyist to set up a LoRaWAN-powered sensor network with minimal cost. Let's take take a look at exactly what is involved in setting up LoRaWAN devices, and what possible alternatives to LoRaWAN might be considered.
Although it is encumbered by US patent 9,647,718 (warning for PDF) it appears royalty-free, and while the specification is available for anyone to implement the actual radios are tied to the company Semtech.
The LoRa Alliance has a different strategy. They would say they're more open than Sigfox because the specification that governs how the network is managed is relatively open. You can download the specifications and join the LoRa Alliance, and any hardware or gateway manufacturer can build a module or gateway that conforms with LoRa specifications. The catch is that the only company that makes the radio for LoRa is Semtech. (Some other manufacturers make system-in-package devices with Semtech silicon or IP inside.) So while the ecosystem itself is open, it does have a closed element.
One nice thing about LoRaWAN's open standard is its potential to be flexible—it's not going to be driven by a specific company. In practice, this does result in slower development, because you're developing standards by committee.
It has some interesting capabilities.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday January 24 2022, @08:49AM
I missed the link for the second block quote. The second block quote is from SigFox Vs. LoRa: A Comparison Between Technologies & Business Models [link-labs.com].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Monday January 24 2022, @09:07AM
We've used a pile of LoRaWAN gear and its huge selling feature is that it just damn works. Activate it, connect (typically via a QR code) and it works. We've got things running off AA batteries over quite some distance for, so far, 6-12 months, without any problems. Having become used to the neverending crapfest that is anything connected via WiFi and Bluetooth, I still can't get over how functional LoRaWAN is, it's such a refreshing change to encounter tech that doesn't need more ongoing nursing than an incontinent toddler. I couldn't care less about whether there's a patent or not (both Bluetooth and WiFi are riddled with them in any case), all that matters is that I can unpack it, fire it up, and it works and keeps working.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Ingar on Monday January 24 2022, @11:22AM
Does the S in LoRaWAN have the same meaning as in IoT ?
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday January 24 2022, @11:25AM (4 children)
I've been using LoRaWan for some years now. While I agree that a typical range for usage is 10-15km, I've achieved longer distances than that (30km+) but I am far, far behind these guys:
It is truly amazing how much information can be packed into a handful of bytes and transmitted reliably. I've got to agree with driverless' comment above 1215227 [soylentnews.org] - it just works, and keeps on working. I'm such an enthusiastic user that I also provide an internet access point for any other LoRaWan users in the area. Unfortunately my home is in a bit of a poor signal area between 2 areas of significant LoRaWan cover so my gateway on the top of my house serves both me and any nearby neighbours. A lot of my connections are from passing vehicles, both commercial and private, from a busy arterial road within 1km. I've no idea what they are using it for but during the winter months I might only get a handful of hits per day, during the tourist season I can easily see upwards of 30 hits/day plus.
I use Pycom [pycom.io] devices which are based on the ESP32. They are not the cheapest but I have found them to be reliable and easy to use. I tend to make my own systems that use LoRaWan rather than to buy the more expensive commercial offerings, but I am quite at home wielding a soldering iron - but such skills are not essential. It is easy to make a working system on a breadboard. However, my eyesight is making the task a little harder with each passing year!
Its also worth looking at some of the many Youtube videos produced by "Andreas Spiess" [youtube.com] which cover LoRaWan.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday January 24 2022, @04:48PM (3 children)
There must be an IP over LoRaWan protocol then. I guess it is only usable for tailor made use cases due to bandwidth limitations. Could you point to the protocol? What kind of net data rates are achievable for IP traffic?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24 2022, @05:50PM
I've seen ~50Kbps mentioned for LoRa, but I'm not sure what transport that used. Should be fast enough for everything short of video though.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday January 24 2022, @08:12PM (1 child)
It is a simple question but a complicated answer. There is a trade-off between range and data rate - the higher the data rate the shorter the achievable range. The first document link gives a technical explanation if that is what you want, but you are looking at a few bytes to perhaps 250 of bytes as the payload. Anything more than that is impossible. The second link gives you the bare rates and spread factors (which are important for Chirp transmissions). You are also limited to how many transmissions you can make in a particular time period depending on the size of the payload - everybody is trying to use the same frequency band and there is no control over who transmits when. You have to play fair with other users.
It is designed to allow exchange simple data blocks (gate is open, power is on, water-pump has failed etc) where things can be represented by single bits or a few bytes to be transmitted for, say, ranges up-to 12-15 km. I have used it to enable my late wife to ask me to call her (she was unable to use a telephone to make calls for the last year or so of her life). I could then call her and she could pass me a message. The LoRaWan device simply gave me a 'call home - routine', 'return home - emergency' or a 'heartbeat' signal that reassured me that we were still in contact and simply flashed an LED on my device. Essentially, that could be achieved by using 2 bits of a single byte, but I used a second byte as a rolling checksum so that I could see how long I might have been out-of-contact for if I had not been paying attention to the LED. The entire thing could fit in my shirt pocket but required a small lapel antenna. It was powered by a single lithium battery that required charging about once a month - I didn't need to turn it off.
It is not going to be a replacement for CB, ham radio or walkie talkies, nor are you going to be streaming data over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 26 2022, @12:06AM
Thanks for your explanations. Nice to hear how you made it work for you, too. And consolations on the loss of your wife. You sound like you tried to be a very good partner while you had time together.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday January 24 2022, @02:18PM
I liked the plot! Underneath all the protocols, there is an RF signal, easy to forget.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24 2022, @06:48PM (9 children)
Amazing how many soylentnewsers fall for advertising under the guise of a news release. Why not use open standards for radio phy and mac? Think about how wifi would work if there were only one or two proprietary radios owned by only one or two corporations. If you fall for this, where is the interoperability?
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday January 24 2022, @08:29PM (8 children)
You have missed the entire point. There is only 1 company producing the chip but there are numerous manufactures using it. This isn't a tie in to a particular company. The device is licensed world-wide. It is also being used world wide and has its own professional specifications and users. Governments are investing in the masts to support it. In Western Europe you would now be hard pushed to find a major city that has not got an active LoRaWan network and it is rapidly spreading to less populated areas - very often sharing the same infrastructure and towers as the phone network. The usage of LoRaWan is free although some companies might charge for access to their gateways. I pay nothing at all to use it. And others like me provide free access gateways between LoRaWan and the internet. (Total cost of my gateway was under €80 - and the running costs are negligible).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24 2022, @10:12PM (2 children)
So...proprietary?
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday January 25 2022, @06:51AM (1 child)
Do you make your own CPUs, memory, motherboards, mice, drives or are they, you know, proprietary?
Tell me how you manufacture your Intel or AMD CPUs - I'm sure many of us would love to know how you do that in the comfort of your own home. Is that the home that you built yourself, with the bricks that you manufactured, and the plumbing that you have shaped out of bamboo?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @07:03PM
I do live in a house that I built, thanks for asking. I used standard lumber, not some special thing that I could only ever get from a single source. Please try harder to convince us that single-sourced items are better than common standards.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday January 25 2022, @02:57AM
It's proprietary, but so is ARM.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Tuesday January 25 2022, @04:10AM (3 children)
Is it a point-to-point network, at least for distances around 10 km or so, then if you want to go further you go out a gateway? How does that work? Would my device get its own IP address? For your gateway, do you have the hardware set up in a DMZ on your network?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday January 25 2022, @08:00AM
It is a usually a broadcast system. I strongly recommend that you watch a couple of the videos that I linked to up a page a little here [soylentnews.org]. He is better at explaining it than I am. It is also worth a search on google, or on sites such as Hackaday etc.
I have used it as 1 transmitter broadcasting and 1 device receiving, listening only for signals from that transmitter. It is in this example a simple point to point. But you may wish to communicate further or with multiple devices. What is normally done in such cases is that you use a gateway to access the internet and record the messages on a website somewhere. I have my own gateway but there are many commercial offerings (all with free packages for low volume traffic) that can do this for you. Additionally, there are many free-for-use gateways in major urban or industrial areas. If a device is in receive mode then it cannot be transmitting at the same time. So you can either schedule that it transmits say, periodically directly or via the internet again. What you use it for is limited by your imagination and your ability to write simple software to control the devices. The examples I gave in an earlier post were all one-way monitoring events where a user wants to know the state of a remote sensor.
There are many cheap SBC capable of using LoRaWan available. As I have stated I tend to use a particular brand of board based on the ESP32 cpu. But there are many others including Arduino or BeagleBoard. I program in micropython but there are several languages available depending on the board you choose. Lua seems popular, as well as assembly for those who want to get every bit of processing out of their device.
It has been popular in Europe for 5 years or more but reading on the internet suggests that it is less well used in the USA. Its signals can be significantly attenuated by buildings or dense trees so it is far more useful in rural areas. But if the range from you to the sensor you wish to monitor is only a few km then it will usually perform fine. It is a very simple system but restricted by the data payload being limited at around a maximum of 220 bytes here in Europe, and with that size payload it will have the shortest range and you would have to transmit less frequently than a smaller payload. It isn't a replacement for any other communications system but it does fill a very useful niche for very low cost.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday January 25 2022, @08:15AM (1 child)
A few suggestions for reading - none of them is perfect but if you scan them all you will begin to get a feel for the system. The gateway is not required if you only want to do point-to-point communication - usually in 1 direction.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hubie on Tuesday January 25 2022, @05:54PM
Thank you, I really appreciate this and I will follow these links. A few years back we had a student intern working on a student hardware project. We were using the Adafruit Feather hardware (for someone who grew up with Heathkits and TTL chips, the breadth, interoperability, and dirt-cheap prices of what you can get these days simply makes my head explode!) and I noticed some LoRa stuff they had. The project was more or less a fancy weather station that we wanted to deploy and I was wondering whether LoRa would allow us to remotely turn it on/off and do some simple things. I started reading into it and I found it confusing what was needed (Was it free? What was this $5/mo I saw? Things like that.), but I'll confess that I didn't really dig too hard into the details as this remote operation was a "nice to have" that we ended up not having time to implement. But the Adafruit/Sparkfun web sites always get me excited to come up with my own personal projects and I would like to know more about LoRaWAN.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Monday January 24 2022, @06:49PM
This reminds me of how during the worst part of the pandemic I got in to listening or watching signals through SDRs attached to antennas that hams had put online. That's how I learned about the WSPR protocol [wikipedia.org] which uses low-power signals to transmit just a teeny, tiny bit of data not 10s of km, but 100s. When I was stuck inside and away from people that long, there was some joy to be found in seeing the graphics that represented signals actually spring to life, hitting decode, and then actually seeing that I had witnessed one of these amazing little transmissions. It didn't get me in to becoming a ham, but I can see how there's still some appeal.
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