A Survey of Two Dominant Low Power and Long Range Communication Technologies

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects various kinds of things such as: physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and etc. to each other enabling them to exchange data. The IoT also allows objects to be sensed or controlled remotely and results in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefits. Therefore, the number of connected devices through IoT are increasing rapidly. Machina Research estimates that the IoT will consist of about 25 billion objects by 2020. Different network technologies have been developed to provide connectivity of this large number of devices, like WiFi for cellular based connections, ZigBee and Bluetooth for indoor connections and Low Power Wide Area Network's (LPWAN) for low power long distance connections. LPWAN may be used as a private network, or may also be a service offered by a third party, allowing companies to deploy it without investing in gateway technology. Two available leading technologies for LPWAN are narrow-band systems and wide-band plus coding gain systems. In the first one, receiver bandwidth is scaled down to reduce noise seen by the receiver, while in the second one, coding gain is added to higher rate signal to combat the high receiver noise in a wideband receiver. This paper is a survey on both systems. The survey includes an in-depth study of their important parameters such as battery lifetime, capacity, cost, QoS, latency, reliability, and range and presents a comprehensive comparison between them. This paper reviews created testbeds of recent researches over both systems to compare and verify their performance