The business case for densification of LoRaWAN deployments

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

The first wave of LoRaWAN was primarily focussed on large country-wide deployments led by operators such as KPN, Orange, Swisscom and many more worldwide. However, the next wave that is already coming is the arrival of private LoRaWAN deployments from large enterprises and enabling roaming for inter-connection amongst public/private networks (esp. for use cases which involve LPWAN Geolocation [8] [9]]). As the IoT deployments grow in both the densification and geographical footprint, it is inevitable that network design becomes one of the important factors ensuring long term success and profitability of both operators and end-customers relying on LoRaWAN connectivity for their IoT use cases
Compared to mesh technologies, the single hop to network infrastructure minimizes power consumption as nodes do not need to relay communication from other nodes. Another advantage is that gradual initial network deployment in sparse mode with low node density is possible, compared to mesh which requires minimum node density to operate. Even more importantly, LoRaWAN is immune from the exponential packet loss suffered by multi-hop RF mesh technologies in presence of increasing interferers and noise floor power.

Another unique feature of LoRaWAN networks is that messages in uplink can be received by any gateway (Rx macro-diversity), and it is the function of network server to remove duplicates in uplink and select the best gateway for downlink transmission based on the uplink RSSI estimates. This allows enabling of features such as geolocation to be easily built into LoRaWAN deployment and enables uplink macro-diversity that significantly improves network capacity and QoS (Quality of Service).
LoRaWAN also supports features such as Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) that allows network server to dynamically change parameters of end-devices such as transmit power, frequency and spreading factor via downlink MAC commands. Optimization of theses settings is key to increase the capacity and reduce the power consumption of end-devices.
The optimization of LoRaWAN parameters along with densification can lead massive amounts of capacity increase and reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the network. In fact, the LoRaWAN capacity of the network can scale almost indefinitely with densification.
Densification leads to very dramatic reduction in power consumption of the end-devices thus reducing overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

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