LoRaWAN

showstack / protocols / lorawan

Also called LoRa.

Kilometres of range on a coin cell, at a trickle of data. LoRa is the radio modulation; LoRaWAN is the network on top of it, in which devices talk to gateways and gateways forward to a network server. Built for sensors that report occasionally over a very large area.

Network transportOpen, free sign-upLoRa AllianceReported

Management Housekeeping, no deadline

Discovery, monitoring, configuration, backups, updates. Useful, and none of it has a deadline of its own.

What kills it. Nothing kills it. That is the problem: with no deadline it has no manners, and it will happily starve everything that does have one. Putting it on a show VLAN is the commonest self-inflicted wound in the industry.

Why this one, and not what the category suggests. Long-range, low-rate sensor telemetry. Nothing on it has a show deadline.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What goes wrong

The data rate is tiny and duty cycle is legally limited in most regions. It is not a control network and cannot become one.

Sub-GHz band allocations differ by country — 868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in much of the Americas, and elsewhere again in Asia.

Latency is seconds at best. Nothing a cue waits on should be on it.

Typical use

Site-wide environmental sensing across a festival or a campus.
Crowd counting, gate counts and asset tracking where the update rate is minutes rather than milliseconds.
Anything where running power or a network to the sensor is the actual problem.

Sources

LoRaWAN — LoRa Alliance primary

Understand the mechanism

Robots, animatronics and connected things

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

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