Lorawan is a data connection protocol developed in 2015 by LORA Alliance to provide a low-power connectivity solution for battery-powered devices. Lorawan and Lora stand for Low Range Platform to use Low Power Wide Range Network (LPWAN) specification supporting IoT solutions. Lorawan is ideal for IoT devices due to its low energy consumption and remote transmission capability as a long-range wireless protocol.
Lorawan ensures secure communication between devices and application servers using AES-128 encryption. It is easy to use a public/private Lorawan network with the same hardware (gateway, terminal antennas, software UDP packet forwarding, base station software and Lorawan stack) for both terminals.
Lorawan is a protocol that runs on the LORA modulation to manage the network connection. According to Wikipedia, Lorawan is defined as a communication protocol for the system architecture of the network (LORA) and an alliance of physical layers to enable remote communications. Lorawan was defined as a “communication protocol and system architecture for the network” and an “alliance of physical layers” to enable communication connections with greater reach.
LORA is a point-to-multipoint network protocol using the Semtech Lora modulation scheme. The Lorawan standard is designed for IoT solutions between Lora devices and enables connections to remote points with devices such as LPWAN for deployment and analysis applications. The Lora Gateway acts as packet forwarding and sends packets to Lora Network Server (LNS) for backhaul connections over Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, LTE-M and NB-IoT.
LORA itself represents the physical level of network technology and is powered by wireless modulation, which is used to establish remote communication between devices. Lorawan is the software layer that defines how devices use LORA modulation hardware, such as transmitting and formatting messages. LORA is not just about radio waves, but also about how these radio waves communicate through Lora gateways to do things like encryption and identification.
Lorawan uses the LORA protocol (Media Access Control (MAC) protocol) for low-range and long-range networks, an open standard defined by the LORA Alliance. It encompasses the energy-efficient nature of the protocol and the fact that many battery-powered devices rely on it. Lorawan can be used for industrial and home networking applications but has some limitations. If there is another open-source protocol for Lora that fits your use case, download this whitepaper to get a clear explanation of how it compares to Lorawan.
Unlike other wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi, 6Lowpan, ZigBee, etc., short-distance communication, high data rates and the use of appropriate data compression enable a broad range of uses for which network capacity is no longer a limitation. The Lorawan protocol is standardized, widely available and Digi-Lorawan can operate in a connected global ecosystem managed by the LORA Alliance. Low power consumption and long-range allow Digi-Lorawan connections to penetrate structures such as concrete structures giving it a huge advantage over other protocols such as Wi-Fi.
In this paper, we will investigate the use of the protocols LORA and Lorawan for transmitting ambient sensor data between an IoT solution and an IoT gateway.
Lorawan is a cloud-based media access control layer protocol that acts as a network layer protocol and manages communications between the LPWAN gateways, end nodes, devices and routing protocols maintained by the LORA Alliance. It is a sublayer of the Layer 2 Protocol, which acts as the Network Layer 3 protocol and manages communication between LPWAN gateway, end node and devices, as well as the routing protocol maintained by the Alliance Loras.
The physical layer used for Lorawan is LORA and was developed by Semtech, a company based in Chirp and covers a spectrum of CSS modulation. In other words, the Loras modulation that manages the network connection can be considered as the PHY layer of the Lorawan connection layer. The modulation, sensors and radio bridges are based on the Lorawan protocol and are compatible with the industry-standard Lorawan gateways.
Lorawan is a secure wireless media protocol for wide-area networks using LORA radio. It enables low-power devices to communicate with applications connected to the Internet remotely via wireless connections. Lorawan acts as a star in the network, using a centralized gateway to communicate between connecting points and nodes (DIGI), and the Lorawan Development Kit is designed to support rapid prototyping and time-to-market.
When you buy a Lorawan sensor with a radio bridge, you can connect it to any standard Lorawan gateway or network server, of which many are sold by our partners.
LORA gateways such as those listed above are physical devices that host the hardware and firmware used to connect IoT solutions to the cloud and are an integral part of the task of forming the backbone of a functioning IoT network in Slovakia. A Lorawan Gateway is a box that connects a wireless Lorawan terminal device (e.g. A sensor) to the Internet via a local network. The gateway connects to a network server via a standard IP connection, and the terminal device uses wireless single-hop communication with one of the many gateways.
The Lorawan network is a star-to-star topology consisting of one or more gateways, terminals and the Lorawan Network Server. The Lorawan Server is the infrastructure for the global community of users to support their network and install individual gateways for better coverage of specific areas when needed.
One area where Lorawan differs from other network specifications is the use of a star architecture in which a central node and other nodes are connected to a gateway that acts as a transparent bridge to send messages between terminal devices and a central network server in the backend. The network server is either in the cloud, where it is managed by Comcast MachineQ as a service or as a physical gateway that operates in packet forwarding mode, sending raw LORA packets over the air to the network server as if it were over-the-air.
