Understanding the limits of LoRaWAN

TL;DR

This paper provides an impartial overview of LoRaWAN's limitations, illustrating where its scalability and performance may fall short in large-scale IoT deployments.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of LoRaWAN's limitations with practical use case examples, aiding in understanding its operational boundaries.

Findings

Identifies key scalability constraints of LoRaWAN.

Highlights performance issues in large deployments.

Provides practical use case insights.

Abstract

The quick proliferation of LPWAN networks, being LoRaWAN one of the most adopted, raised the interest of the industry, network operators and facilitated the development of novel services based on large scale and simple network structures. LoRaWAN brings the desired ubiquitous connectivity to enable most of the outdoor IoT applications and its growth and quick adoption are real proofs of that. Yet the technology has some limitations that need to be understood in order to avoid over-use of the technology. In this article we aim to provide an impartial overview of what are the limitations of such technology, and in a comprehensive manner bring use case examples to show where the limits are.