Advantages of LoRa in Cellular and LAN

Local area networks such as WiFi or Bluetooth are already mature technologies. There are well-established standards for this type of small wireless communication, such as WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Zigbee and Z-Wave. But the biggest problem with many LANs/Personal Area Networks are battery consumption.

Similar to wireless networks, cellular networks are also one of the recognized networks. However, fundamentally mobile networks like LTE were developed for data throughput, and these networks are not the best when it comes to power consumption.

Low-power wide-area networks like LoRaWAN, on the other hand, are built from the ground up. LoRa was developed to be used only with IoT devices that require optimal battery life.

Additionally, LoRa type networks are well suited for IoT applications as they require minimal deployment costs.

In comparison, both LAN and cellular networks are very expensive to deploy over wide areas (eg, covering an entire city).

feature	Wan	narrowband	LTE Cat-1	LTE Cat-M	Narrowband LTE
modulation	SS Chi	UNB/GSK/BPSK	OFDMA	OFDMA	OFDMA
Receive bandwidth	500-125 kHz	100 Hz	20MHz	20-1.4 MHz	200kHz
data rate	290bps – 50Kbps	100 bits/second Up to 12/8 bytes	10Mbps	200kbps – 1Mbps	20 Kbps
Maximum output power	20 dBm	20 dBm	23 – 46 dBm	23/30 dBm	20 dBm
Battery life – 2000 mAh	105 months (~9 years)	90 months (7.5 years)		18 months (1.5 years)
link budget	154 decibels	151 decibels	More than 30 decibels	146 decibels	150 decibels
Safety	yes	No	yes	yes	yes

The cellular network has the characteristics of wide coverage area, small switching delay, and strong continuity. Currently, more and more mobile terminal data are transmitted through the cellular network, so the load capacity of the cellular network needs to be further improved. The bandwidth and stability of LTE that has been deployed cannot fully meet the growing demand for data transmission. In order to improve data transmission capabilities, operators are committed to researching cellular network link aggregation technology in order to increase cellular network bandwidth. Operators study link aggregation from base stations to the Internet segment. The principle is that in LTE, according to different data services, the internal control plane network elements of the core network select different base stations to transmit data, thus increasing the load capacity of the system. However, mobile terminals cannot directly Improve link bandwidth through the operator’s link aggregation technology.

Keywords: lora