What is a low-power WAN?

The development trend of the Internet of Things is becoming more and more rapid. However, the series of problems of power consumption, distance and cost have hindered the development of the Internet of Things. The low-power wide area network (LPWAN) is based on solving these needs. Its low power consumption and long-distance advantage break the bottleneck of the development of the Internet of Things to help the Internet of Things take off.

Overview of the trend of the Internet of Things

After LTE (4G), wireless communication technology can no longer meet the increasing user demand. It has begun to develop in two directions. It has taken two very different paths: one is to continue to improve the communication rate of 5G. Technology; the other is LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Network) technology that reduces communication speed while reducing power consumption, increasing coverage, and increasing the number of access nodes.

With the development of wireless communication technology and the new generation of physics and new materials technology, the cost of sensors, networked processors and bandwidth has been greatly reduced, and the Internet of Things has made great progress in the direction of the interconnection of all things. The network is an important part of the Internet of Things industry. There is no doubt that the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) represented by NB-IOT and Lora is the limelight industry of the current and future development of the Internet of Things. Secondly, based on the requirements of security, power consumption and reliability, edge computing that provides services near the edge of the network near the object or data source will become one of the development trends of the Internet of Things, and further based on edge computing, The terminal intelligence (edge ​​intelligence) that deploys artificial intelligence on the edge side is also beginning to see. At present, many chips or artificial intelligence companies have invested in research and development of low-power AI chips at home and abroad. In the future, more data will be transferred to terminal devices. Upon completion, the intelligence will sink to the terminal device. At the same time, along with the rise of the blockchain, the object chain network combining the Internet of Things with the blockchain can effectively reduce the operating costs of the Internet of Things, solve the security privacy and tap the commercial value has become a unicorn in the industry.

What is LPWAN?

As mentioned before, the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) is the limelight industry of the current Internet of Things. So what advantages does LPWAN have to make it occupy the wind? Below we reveal the veil of LPWAN from several aspects.

Distance

Common short-range wireless communication technologies, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, have a communication distance of tens of meters. If you want to cover a network in one region and one city, the deployment cost will be higher. The low-power WAN wireless communication distance can reach several kilometers or even tens of kilometers. The increase of wireless communication distance has brought new development space for IoT applications, supplemented the short board of IoT wireless communication distance, and provided technical support for large-scale application deployment of Internet of Things.

Rate

Computers browsing the web, video and other application requirements are pursuing high data rates, the faster the better. On the other hand, in some applications of the Internet of Things, the data rate is not as fast as possible, the communication frequency is low, and the amount of data transmitted is also very small, such as meter reading.

3. Power consumption

High data rates result in high power consumption and require ample power supply. The low-power WAN has a low data rate, and the terminal node only needs a small amount of power to maintain its work, so that it can be powered by battery power or other energy collection methods, which helps to make the terminal node large within a certain range. Access to the network on a scale.

4. Authorization

The radio spectrum is a limited and non-renewable natural resource. At present, most of the spectrum management in each country adopts a fixed spectrum allocation strategy, that is, spectrum resources are managed by government authorities and assigned to fixed authorized users, thus ensuring avoidance between users. Interfere with each other and make better use of spectrum resources. At present, spectrum resources can be divided into two categories: licensed spectrum and unlicensed spectrum. Among the licensed spectrums of LPWAN, NB-IOT is more representative. In LPWAN, the unlicensed spectrum is more representative of Lora. Generally speaking, if the built Internet of Things is large, such as covering cities or even countries, it is a better choice to choose licensed spectrum. If it is commercialized and builds its own network, the cost of unlicensed spectrum is lower.

Low-power wide-area networks, as the name suggests, have the most prominent advantages of low power consumption and long transmission distances.

Long distance: depending on the deployment environment, a gateway or base station can cover several kilometers or even tens of kilometers.

Low data rate: The data rate generally does not exceed 5 kbps, and the frequency of communication several times per day varies from tens to hundreds of bytes each time.

Low power consumption: Battery powered or other energy harvesting power can last for years or even longer. The figure below shows the LPWAN characteristic indicators:

LPWAN characteristic index

Why is LPWAN so important?

The current Internet of Things is moving toward large-scale deployment, and LPWAN plays a pivotal role in the large-scale deployment of the Internet of Things with its low power consumption and wide-area performance. In the current promotion of China Manufacturing 2025 and the development of smart cities, there is a very good phase. In the 17 years, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Notice on Comprehensively Promoting the Construction and Development of Mobile Internet of Things (NB-IOT)", which greatly promoted the development of LPWAN. With the popularity of edge computing products, only the core data needs to be transmitted to complete the construction of the Internet of Things system. LPWAN can fully meet the current requirements for small data throughput, like the blood vessels of the Internet of Things, to achieve interoperability.

To become the leader of the industrial Internet ecosystem is our pursuit of Zhiyuan Electronics. Zhiyuan Electronics is committed to building an ecosystem of sensing control, interconnection, artificial intelligence and service models. Wireless communication is the basic core technology of the Internet of Things, and Zhiyuan Electronics has always focused on the cutting-edge technology of the industrial Internet. At present, Zhiyuan Electronics has launched a LoRa core board LM400T for ultra-long-range wireless communication. Users can perform rapid secondary development based on the AMetal platform and provide support for one-button self-organizing network functions, with a focus on the difficult development of LoRa protocol. At the same time, for different industry applications, LM400T is equipped with a special meter reading protocol, CLAA protocol and LoRaWAN protocol. In terms of hardware, the LM400T uses a unique spectrum widening technology to solve the problem of ultra-long-distance communication with small data volumes in complex environments.

At the same time, based on the user's demand for IoT construction of short-distance multi-network, Zhiyuan electronic ZigBee transparent transmission module: AW/ZM5161 series, the module is equipped with a robust FastZigBee networking transparent transmission protocol, users can quickly access without touching complex wireless protocols. Building a ZigBee network and breaking through the traditional ZigBee wireless network can join the technical bottleneck of too few nodes.

Zigbee transparent transmission module physical map