What is The LoRaWAN ?

ATLAS LoRa & LoRaWAN

What is LoRa?

LoRa® is the physical layer or the wireless modulation utilized to create the long range communication link. Many legacy wireless systems use frequency shifting keying (FSK) modulation as the physical layer because it is a very efficient modulation for achieving low power. LoRa® is based on chirp spread spectrum modulation, which maintains the same low power characteristics as FSK modulation but significantly increases the communication range. Chirp spread spectrum has been used in military and space communication for decades due to the long communication distances that can be achieved and robustness to interference, but LoRa® is the first low cost implementation for commercial usage.

What is LoRaWAN?

LoRaWAN™ defines the communication protocol and system architecture for the network while the LoRa® physical layer enables the long-range communication link. The protocol and network architecture have the most influence in determining the battery lifetime of a node, the network capacity, the quality of service, the security, and the variety of applications served by the network.

ATLAS has selected LoRaWAN as its main wireless technological choice for its low power industrial grade sensors.

LoRaWAN™ is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification intended for wireless battery operated “Things” in a regional, national or global network. LoRaWAN targets key requirements of Internet of Things such as secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services. The LoRaWAN specification provides seamless interoperability among smart Things without the need of complex local installations and gives back the freedom to the user, developer, businesses enabling the roll out of Internet of Things.

National wide networks targeting internet of things such as critical infrastructure, confidential personal data or critical functions for the society has a special need for secure communication. This has been solved by several layer of encryption:

Unique Network key (EUI64) and ensure security on network level
Unique Application key (EUI64) ensure end to end security on application level
Device specific key (EUI128)

The ATLAS devices are supporting the LoRaWAN 1.02 standards and are used succesfully on various Network servers such as TTN, TTI, Orange, Objenious, Comcast, Senet, NNNCo, Meshed, EveryNet, Kerlink Wanesy, ThingPark Actility and many more…

LoRaWAN network architecture is typically laid out in a star-of-stars topology in which gateways is a transparent bridge relaying messages between end-devices and a central server in the backend. Gateways are connected to the network server via standard IP connections while end-devices use single-hop wireless communication to one or many gateways. Our end-point communication is bi-directional, allowing control back to our sensors. In the case of Atlas devices, our concept permits reading and writing (open/close or On/Off) commands).

ommunication between end-devices and gateways is spread out on different frequency channels and data rates. The selection of the data rate is a trade-off between communication range and message duration. Due to the spread spectrum technology, communications with different data rates do not interfere with each other and create a set of “virtual” channels increasing the capacity of the gateway. LoRaWAN data rates range from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps. To maximize both battery life of the end-devices and overall network capacity, the LoRaWAN network server is managing the data rate and RF output for each end-device individually by means of an adaptive data rate (ADR) scheme