Qualitative Assessment of Low Power Wide Area Network Protocols and their Security Aspect

TL;DR

This paper qualitatively analyzes LPWAN protocols like LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and Sigfox, focusing on their characteristics, security aspects, and suitability for IoT devices with long-life batteries in sparse networks.

Contribution

It provides a comparative qualitative assessment of LPWAN protocols and discusses their challenges and opportunities for constrained IoT devices.

Findings

LoRaWAN offers flexible deployment options.

Security aspects vary significantly among protocols.

LoRaWAN is suitable for sparse sensor networks.

Abstract

There are currently many communication options in the Internet of Things, even in particular areas such as constrained and battery-powered devices, such as Low Power Wide Area Networks. Understanding the differences and characteristics of each option is a challenge, even for professionals and researchers in the field. To meet this need, this work analyses the qualitative characteristics of Low Power Wide Area Network protocols and the challenges and opportunities of using constrained devices for sparse networks based on long-life batteries. For this study, a bibliographic survey of the literature was carried out as an analysis of three protocols (LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and Sigfox), and a detailing of the first one. As a result, there is a discussion about the chosen network protocol and its use in IoT solutions with sparse sensors.