Nowadays, there are various wireless transmission technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 4G. Instead of competing with each other, these technologies actually have their individual characteristics and suitable applications. In this article, we will talk about LoRa (Long Range) wireless technology that is mainly applied to LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network). As the name implies, this technology is applied to the low power network transmission of long distance.
LPWAN is suitable for utilities
Currently, IoT can connect to the internet through LAN, LPWAN and Cellular networks, but none of these technologies can cover all application scenarios of IoT. For instance, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are mainly adopted to applications related to personal devices and the major application scenarios of 4G Cellular technology include those require high data transmission and power supply. The application scenarios of LPWAN discussed in this article featuring the requirement of a longer battery life and under long distance while the sensor and application only need to transmit data for several times instead of high-speed and large data transmission. LoRa wireless technology is generated from this kind of application demands; the name “LoRa” comes from the phrase “long range”, indicating the biggest benefit of this technology: long distance transmission. A single gateway or base station can cover the range of the whole city or several hundred to thousand meters.
In LPWAN, LoRaWAN (long-range wide area network) is adopted by more service providers because it involves more telecommunication services providers, is a public network and still operable even under noise level. LoRaWAN can be applied to public and private networks with the benefits of long distance and low cost. In addition, LoRaWAN has the advantages of low power and maintaining a longer battery life.
Manthink in Beijing is dedicated to the development of LoRaWAN solutions and launched related wireless modules, base station and cloud services to build a comprehensive IoT network environment. These solutions can be applied to remote data collection of water meter, electricity meter and gas meter or applications such as smart traffic, parking lot and positioning and fields including smart building (temperature, humidity, toxic smoke, access control, etc.), smart water management, and agriculture and equipment management. They can maximize the IoT application potential of LoRaWAN in projects like smart meter reading, smart community, smart factory, smart agriculture and smart city.
Since LoRaWAN has a larger structure involving front-end LoRa transmission module, the gateway in the middle and back-end cloud service (server), it covers more product items. The LoRa module from Manthink, which consists of LoRa RF front-end module of PM series, is equipped with SPI interface and LCC package. It can be embedded in or integrated with electronic products users wish to combine, enabling customers to save on device development cost. Meanwhile, LoRa transparent transmission module of UM series is also available; this module contains the built-in UART interface, with four operation modes and flexible parameters. Under sleep and energy-saving modes, the power consumption can be minimized to under 1.3μA, enabling users to finish product development in a short time.
Manthink also launched LW series LoRaWAN module supporting LoRaWAN protocol and UART interface, which supports flexible configuration and data transmission of multiple parameters. Additionally, Manthink also released LoRa RF module and low power Cortex-M0+MCU-based OM series LoRa RF module; combining with the free software development kit, this module can be used to develop various IoT sensor nodes without additional MCUs.
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As for gateway products, GDI series gateway from Manthink can be used indoors; this gateway adopts Semtech SX1301 baseband processor and data concentrator, can configure up to 98 channels via Micro-USB interface and is a gateway with great configuration flexibility. In addition, GDO series gateway can be used outdoors. This gateway also adopts SX1301 chip and can configure up to 196 channels via Micro-USB interface, realizing the gateway, which possesses configuration flexibility and monitor function at the same time.
For back-end servers, Manthink launched ThinkOne Server which supports LoRaWAN standard, capable of accessing LoRaWAN gateway and supporting the interaction among the database, TCP service and user system. ThinkOne Server supports cloud service or configuration adopting LAN, including Network Sever (Nserver), Application Server (Aserver), Management Server (LWConsole) and Customer Server (Cserver). The Cserver refers to B/S or C/S structure server developed by the user that achieves the upward and downward communication of node data through the communication interface of Aserver.
The characteristics of LoRa wireless communication technology, including low power and long distance transmission, make it perfectly suitable for applications of data transmission/receipt in large area. However, except for the hardware, the development of related application program and management system will be the key factors to determine whether these applications can succeed. Furthermore, utilities applications such as remote meter reading, water management and weather observation involve vast investment of hardware and software and consist of tremendous market potential that is worthy of investing in more efforts to develop related applications for service providers.