Search Results (57)

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged as essential connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), addressing requirements for long range, energy efficient communication that traditional wireless technologies cannot meet. With LPWAN connections projected to grow at 26% compound annual growth rate until 2027, understanding real-world performance is crucial for technology selection. This review examines four leading LPWAN technologies—LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and LTE-M. This review analyzes 20 peer reviewed studies from 2015–2025 reporting real-world deployment metrics across power consumption, range, data rate, scalability, availability, and security. Across these studies, practical performance diverges from vendor specifications. In the cited rural and urban LoRaWAN deployments LoRaWAN achieves 2+ year battery life and 11 km rural range but suffers collision limitations above 1000 devices per gateway. Sigfox demonstrates exceptional range (280 km record) with minimal power consumption but remains constrained by 12 byte payloads and security vulnerabilities. NB-IoT provides robust performance with 96–100% packet delivery ratios at −127 dBm on the tested commercial networks, and supports tens of thousands devices per cell, though mobility increases energy consumption. In the cited trials LTE-M offers highest throughput and sub 200 ms latency but fails beyond −113 dBm where NB-IoT maintains connectivity. NB-IoT emerges optimal for large scale stationary deployments, while LTE-M suits high throughput mobile applications. Full article

This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of an IoT-based geolocation system using the Sigfox network to enhance student safety in urban environments. The proposed system integrates a GPS NEO-6M module with a Ufox Devkit, enclosed in a portable housing, to provide low-power and real-time location tracking. A comparative evaluation of three visualization platforms identified Traccar as the most suitable solution, offering superior accuracy, interoperability, and response time. Field tests were conducted in five educational institutions in Ambato, Ecuador, achieving an average geographic accuracy of 4.5 m and operational efficiency ranging from 55% to 78%, depending on network coverage and urban interference. These results demonstrate the feasibility of Sigfox-based geolocation for reliable student monitoring and provide practical insights for deploying scalable, cost-effective safety solutions in educational contexts. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to wirelessly connect billions of physical things to the IT infrastructure. Although there are several radio access technologies available, few of them meet the needs of Internet of Things applications, such as long range, low cost, and low energy consumption. The low data rate of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies, particularly SigFox, makes them appropriate for Internet of Things applications since the longer the radio link’s useable distance, the lower the data rate. Network reliability is the primary goal of SigFox technology, which aims to deliver data messages successfully through redundancy. This raises concerns about SigFox’s scalability and leads to one of its flaws, namely the high collision rate. In this paper, the goal is to prevent collisions by switching to time division multiple access (TDMA) from SigFox’s Aloha-based medium access protocol, utilizing only orthogonal channels, and eliminating redundancy. Consequently, during a designated time slot, each node transmits a single copy of the data message over a particular orthogonal channel. To achieve this, a multi-agent, off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) Q-Learning technique will be used on top of SigFox. In other words, the objective is to increase SigFox’s scalability through the use of Reinforcement Learning based time slot allocation (RL-SCAP). The findings show that, especially in situations with high node densities or constrained communication slots, the proposed protocol performs better than the basic SCAP (Slot and Channel Allocation Protocol) by obtaining a higher Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) in average of 60.58%, greater throughput in average of 60.90%, and a notable decrease in collisions up to 79.37%. Full article

In recent decades, technology has undergone significant transformations, aimed at optimizing and enhancing the quality of human life. A prime example of this progress is the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Today, the IoT is widely applied across diverse sectors, including logistics, communications, agriculture, education, and infrastructure, demonstrating its versatility and profound relevance in various domains. Agriculture has historically been a fundamental sector for meeting humanity’s basic needs, and it is indispensable for survival and development. A critical factor in this regard is climatic and meteorological conditions directly influencing agricultural productivity. Therefore, real-time monitoring and analysis of these variables becomes imperative for optimizing production and reducing vulnerability to climate change. This paper presents the development and implementation of a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) solution using LoRaWAN (long-range wide-area network) technology, designed for real-time environmental monitoring in agricultural applications. The system consists of energy-efficient end nodes and a custom-configured gateway, designed to optimize data transmission and power consumption. The end nodes integrate advanced sensors for temperature, humidity, and pressure, ensuring accurate data collection. Full article

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) technology has been a very popular and powerful prototyping device for decades. It finds applications in both fundamental research or application-oriented tasks. Additionally, the continuing rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates the validation, processing, and decoding of a large number of received signals. This is where SDRs can be a valuable instrument. In this work, we present an open-source software system using GNU Radio and SDRs, which improves the comprehension of the physical layer aspects of Internet of Things communication systems. Our implementation is generic and application-agnostic. Therefore, it can serve as a learning and investigation instrument for any IoT communication system. Within this work, we implement the open-source DASH7 Alliance Protocol (D7AP). The developed software tool can simulate synthetic DASH7 signals, process recorded data sets, and decode the received DASH7 packets in real time using an SDR front-end. The software is accompanied by three data sets collected in controlled, indoor, and suburban environments. The experimental results revealed that the total packet losses of the data sets were 0%, 2.33%, and 16.67%, respectively. Simultaneously, the three data sets were received by a dedicated DASH7 gateway with total packet losses of 0%, 3.83%, and 7.92%, respectively. Full article

Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies as part of IoT are gaining a lot of attention as they provide affordable communication over large areas. LoRa and Sigfox as part of LPWAN have emerged as highly effective and promising non-3GPP unlicensed band IoT technologies while challenging the supremacy of cellular technologies for machine-to-machine-(M2M)-based use cases. This paper presents the design goals of LoRa and Sigfox while throwing light on their suitability in congested environments. A practical traffic generator of both LoRa and Sigfox is introduced and further interpolated for understanding simultaneous operation of 100 to 10,000 such nodes in close vicinity while establishing deep understanding on effects of collision, re-transmissions, and link behaviour. Previous work in this field have overlooked simultaneous deployment, collision issues, effects of re-transmission, and propagation profile while arriving at a number of successful receptions. This work uses packet error rate (PER) and delivery ratio, which are correct metrics to calculate successful transmissions. The obtained results show that a maximum of 100 LoRa and 200 Sigfox nodes can be deployed in a fixed transmission use case over an area of up to 1 km. As part of the future scope, solutions have been suggested to increase the effectiveness of LoRa and Sigfox networks. Full article

Early attention to individuals who suffer falls is a critical aspect when determining the consequences of such accidents, which are among the leading causes of mortality and disability in older adults. For this reason and considering the high number of older adults living alone, the development of automatic fall alerting systems has garnered significant research attention over the past decade. A key element for deploying a fall detection system (FDS) based on wearables is the wireless transmission method employed to transmit the medical alarms. In this regard, the vast majority of prototypes in the related literature utilize short-range technologies, such as Bluetooth, which must be complemented by the existence of a gateway device (e.g., a smartphone). In other studies, standards like Wi-Fi or 3G communications are proposed, which offer greater range but come with high power consumption, which can be unsuitable for most wearables, and higher service fees. In addition, they require reliable radio coverage, which is not always guaranteed in all application scenarios. An interesting alternative to these standards is Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, which minimize both energy consumption and hardware costs while maximizing transmission range. This article provides a comprehensive search and review of that works in the literature that have implemented and evaluated wearable FDSs utilizing LPWAN interfaces to transmit alarms. The review systematically examines these proposals, considering various operational aspects and identifying key areas that have not yet been adequately addressed for the viable implementation of such detectors. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring about the next industrial revolution in Industry 4.0. The communication aspect of IoT devices is one of the most critical factors in choosing the device that is suitable for use. Thus far, the IoT physical layer communication challenges have been met with various communications protocols that provide varying strengths and weaknesses. This paper summarizes the network architectures of some of the most popular IoT wireless communications protocols. It also presents a comparative analysis of some of the critical features, including power consumption, coverage, data rate, security, cost, and quality of service (QoS). This comparative study shows that low-power wide area network (LPWAN)-based IoT protocols (LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M) are more suitable for future industrial applications because of their energy efficiency, high coverage, and cost efficiency. In addition, the study also presents an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application perspective on the suitability of LPWAN protocols in a particular scenario and addresses some open issues that need to be researched. Thus, this study can assist in deciding the most suitable IoT communication protocol for an industrial and production field. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new future technology that is aimed at connecting billions of physical-world objects to the IT infrastructure via a wireless medium. Many radio access technologies exist, but few address the requirements of IoT applications such as low cost, low energy consumption, and long range. Low-Power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies, especially SigFox, have a low data rate that makes them suitable for IoT applications, especially since the lower the data rate, the longer the usable distance for the radio link. SigFox technology achieves as a main objective network reliability by striving for the successful delivery of data messages through redundancy. Doing so results in one of the SigFox weaknesses, namely the high collision rate, which questions SigFox scalability. In this work, we aimed at avoiding collisions by changing SigFox’s Aloha-based medium access protocol to TDMA and by using only orthogonal channels while removing redundancy. Consequently, every node sends a single copy of the data message on a given orthogonal channel in a specific time slot. To achieve this, we implemented a slot- and channel-allocation protocol (SCAP) on top of SigFox. In other words, our goal was to improve SigFox’s scalability by implementing two mechanisms: time slot allocation and channel allocation. Performance analysis was conducted on large networks with sizes ranging from 1000 to 10,000 nodes to evaluate both technologies: the original SigFox and SCAP SigFox. The simulation results showed that SCAP SigFox highly reduced the probability of collision and energy consumption when compared to the original SigFox. Additionally, SCAP SigFox had a greater throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a part of modern life where it is used for data acquisition and long-range wireless communications. Regardless of the IoT application profile, every wireless communication transmission is enabled by highly efficient antennas. The role of the antenna is thus very important and must not be neglected. Considering the high demand of IoT applications, there is a constant need to improve antenna technologies, including new antenna designs, in order to increase the performance level of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) and enhance their efficiency by enabling a long range and a low error-rate communication link. This paper proposes a new antenna design that is able to increase the performance level of IoT applications by means of an original design. The antenna was designed, simulated, tested, and evaluated in a real operating scenario. From the obtained results, it ensured a high level of performance and can be used in IoT applications specific to the 868 MHz frequency band.By inserting two notches along x axis, we find an optimal structure of the microstrip patch antenna with a reflection coefficient of −34.3 dB and a bandwidth of 20 MHz. After testing the designed novel antenna in real IoT operating conditions, we concluded that the proposed antenna can increase the performance level of IoT wireless communications. Full article

LPWANs are a promising solution for wireless sensor networks. To compete with such widespread technologies as LoRaWAN and Sigfox, recently a new LPWAN technology called NB-Fi has been developed. In a short time, many NB-Fi networks have been deployed in various countries. Although NB-Fi, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN have been designed for similar applications, they implement different approaches. However, no detailed comparisons of them are present in academic literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing and comparing NB-Fi, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN focusing on performance evaluation results rather than just nominal parameters declared by the developers. Specifically, the paper evaluates the packet loss rate, packet error rate, and average delay in these networks in different scenarios. The results are used to provide guidelines to decide which technology to use under which conditions. Specifically, Sigfox performs best in scenarios when devices transmit small pieces of data without repetitions and acknowledgments, and LoRaWAN is the most reliable for transmitting bigger pieces of data, while NB-Fi is best suited for acknowledged transmissions of small pieces of data. Full article

IoT technology is used in various industries, including the manufacturing, energy, finance, education, transportation, smart home, and medical fields. In the medical field, IoT applications can provide high-quality medical services through the efficient management of patients and mobile assets in hospitals. In this paper, we introduce an IoT system to the medical field using Sigfox, a low-power communication network for indoor location monitoring used as a hospital network. A proof-of-concept (PoC) was implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of medical device and patient safety management. Specific requirements should be considered when applying the IoMT system in a hospital environment. In this study, the location and temperature of various targets sending signals to the monitoring system using three different networks (Sigfox, Hospital and Non-Hospital) were collected and compared with true data, the average accuracy of which were 69.2%, 72.5%, and 83.3%, respectively. This paper shows the significance in the application of an IoMT using the Sigfox network in a hospital setting in Korea compared with existing hospital networks. Full article

The ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) satellite IoT system was launched in 2020 to observe the life of animals on Earth: their migratory routes, living conditions, and causes of death. These findings will aid species conservation, protect ecosystem services by animals, measure weather and climate, and help forecast the spread of infectious zoonotic diseases and possibly natural disasters. The aim of this article is to explain the system design of ICARUS. Essential components are ‘wearables for wildlife’, miniature on-animal sensors, quantifying the health of animals and the surrounding environment on the move, and transmitting artificially intelligent summaries of these data globally. We introduce a new class of Internet-of-things (IoT) waveforms—the random-access, very-low-power, wide-area networks (RA-vLPWANs) which enable uncoordinated multiple access at very-low-signal power and low-signal-to-noise ratios. RA-vLPWANs used in ICARUS solve the problems hampering conventional low-power wide area network (LPWAN) IoT systems when applied to space communications. Prominent LPWANs are LoRA, SigFox, MIOTY, ESSA, NB-IoT (5G), or SCADA. Hardware and antenna aspects in the ground and the space segment are given to explain practical system constraints. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fastest emerging technologies in the industry. It includes diverse applications with different requirements to provide services to users. Secure, low-powered, and long-range transmissions are some of the most vital requirements in developing IoT applications. IoT uses several communication technologies to fulfill transmission requirements. However, Low Powered Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) transmission standards have been gaining attention because of their exceptional low-powered and long-distance transmission capabilities. The features of LPWAN transmission standards make them a perfect candidate for IoT applications. However, the current LPWAN standards lack state-of-the-art security mechanism s because of the limitations of the IoT devices in energy and computational capacity. Most of the LPWAN standards, such as Sigfox, NB-IoT, and Weightless, use static keys for node authentication and encryption. LoRaWAN is the only LPWAN technology providing session key mechanisms for better security. However, the session key mechanism is vulnerable to replay attacks. In this paper, we propose a centralized lightweight session key mechanism for LPWAN standards using the Blom–Yang key agreement (BYka) mechanism. The security of the session key mechanism is tested using the security verification tool Scyther. In addition, an energy consumption model is implemented on the LoRaWAN protocol using the NS3 simulator to verify the energy depletion in a LoRaWAN node because of the proposed session key mechanisms. The proposed session key is also verified on the Mininet-WiFi emulator for its correctness. The analysis demonstrates that the proposed session key mechanism uses a fewer number of transmissions than the existing session key mechanisms in LPWAN and provides mechanisms against replay attacks that are possible in current LPWAN session key schemes. Full article

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows users to collect sensor data, control devices, and analyze collected data over the Internet. IoT devices are located in diverse environments and support many applications. To protect IoT systems from cyber threats, Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authentication—the CIA triad—must be supported. However, IoT devices have limited energy and computational resources. Lightweight encryption algorithms have been proposed for IoT, and have been reviewed by previous studies. Some cover communication protocols, while others cover lightweight security or review the challenges in implementing a secure IoT system. The aim of this literature review is to combine the first two topics: communication protocols and lightweight security. They will be approached from a practitioner’s standpoint. Several applications are provided that help readers with a minor background in security to understand these technologies and which elements of the CIA triad have more priority. This paper describes wide-area IoT networks, such as LoRAWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT, and their security. It also describes applications throughout the world, and how to enhance their security by implementing emerging lightweight security—specifically, approaches to make well-known ciphers such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) more lightweight. Full article