LPWA Technologies Overview

What is LPWA?

• Low power wide area (LPWA) technologies fill the gap between mobile (3G, LTE) and short-range wireless (eg Bluetooth, WiFi and ZigBee) networks. They are designed for machine communications, to provide connectivity for devices and applications that require low mobility and low levels of data transfer, and will therefore be critical in the development of the IoT.
• As the name suggests, they have low power draw and provide wide area coverage. They must also be low cost in order to enable the billions of devices that will be connected in the IoT.

What is Sigfox?

• Sigfox is a French company founded in 2009 that employs a proprietary technology and builds wireless networks to connect low-power objects such as electricity meters, smartwatches, which need to be continuously on and emitting small amounts of data.
• Another LPWAN technology.
• It utilizes a wide-reaching signal that passes freely through solid objects, called "ultra narrowband" and requires little energy, being termed "Low-power Wide-area network (LPWAN)".
• The network requires a mobile operator to carry the generated traffic.[5] The signal can also be used to easily cover large areas and to reach underground objects.[6]
• Sigfox has partnered with a number of firms in the LPWAN industry such as Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs and ON Semiconductor.

What is NB-IOT?

• NB-IOT stands for Narrowband IoT.
• NB-IOT is a one of the low power wide Area Network (LPWAN) .
• specifically developed for the Internet of Things (IoT), for devices that require small amounts of data, over long periods and indoor coverage.
• It is a Radio technology standard developed to enable a wide range of devices and services to be connected using cellular telecommunication bands.
• It is one of the range of Mobile IoT(MIoT) technologies standardized by 3GPP(3rd Generation Partnership Project)
• Other 3GPP IOT tech include eMTC (enhanced Amchine type communication) EC-GSM(emhanced coverage GSM)
• The NB-IOT spec was frozen at Release 13 of the 3GPP spec(LTE-Advance Pro) in June 2016

NB-IoT focuses specifically on indoor coverage, low cost, long battery life, and enabling a large number of connected devices.

•   The NB-IoT technology is deployed “in-band” in spectrum allocated to Long Term Evolution (LTE), using resource blocks within a normal LTE carrier (or in the unused resource blocks within a LTE carrier
• It is also suitable for re-framing of GSM spectrum.

What is Cordio-N NarrowBand IoT?

• Arm Cordio-N IP for NarrowBand IoT is a full solution path that enables wide area ultra-low power connectivity the bulk of IoT devices will require.
• The Cordio-N NarrowBand IoT solution consists of the RF and baseband hardware and corresponding software layers 1,2 and 3 specified by 3GPP release-13.
•  It provides a highly integrated IP block together with layer control, digital front end, RF interface, and software.
• The ultra-lightweight protocol stack solution, is designed for optimized low footprint memory and low power/low bandwidth IoT platforms, conforming to the latest 3GPP standard, and is running on Arm Cortex-M processors.
• Cordio-N is optimized from the ground up, specifically targeting low-power and low-cost requirements.
• Cordio radio IP is designed for optimal efficiency with systems built around the Arm Cortex-M processor series.

What is LORA?

• LoRa is a type of modulation for IoT communications.

Source - wikipedia and other sites