When it comes to LoRaWan, many people naturally think of Lora. Lora is a subset of LoRaWan and belongs to a modulation technology of the physical layer. It adopts the linear modulation spread spectrum method, which can significantly improve the receiving sensitivity and achieve a longer communication distance than other modulation methods.
Lora is one of the mainstream LPWAN technologies, and its development status and future trends are of concern to people. So, how much do you know about LoRa?
What is Lora?
Lora, or Long Range Radio, like a chirp spread spectrum modulation technology, was first launched by Cycleo, a startup company founded by several young people in France. In 2012, Semtech acquired this company and modulated it.
The technology is packaged into the chip, and a complete set of LoRa communication chip solutions based on Lora technology has been developed, including different types of Lora chips used in gateways and terminals, opening the road to LoRa chip productization.
However, only a transceiver chip based on LoRa modulation technology is far from enough to leverage the vast IoT market. In the subsequent development process, due to the LoRa Alliance initiated by many manufacturers and the continuous iterative LoRaWAN specification, a wide-area networking standard system supported by hundreds of manufacturers around the world has formed a broad industrial ecosystem.
The relevant technical standards, product design, and application cases that promote this ecology are all processes involving multiple manufacturers. These are also the more critical elements that form the current huge industrial ecology, and they are not owned by a single Semtech company, such as LoRaWAN.
The specification is an open standard with the participation of multiple manufacturers around the world. Any organization or individual can carry out product development and network deployment based on this specification.
Compared with most networks adopting mesh topology, it is easy to continuously expand the network scale, but the disadvantage is that various unrelated nodes are used to forward messages, and the routing is circuitous, which increases system complexity and total power consumption.
Lora adopts star topology (TMD networking mode). The gateway star connects to the terminal node, but the terminal node is not bound to a unique gateway. On the contrary, the uplink data of the terminal node can be sent to multiple gateways. In theory, users can realize flexible networking through Mesh, point-to-point, or star network protocols and architectures.
Lora bands
Lora mainly operates in global free frequency bands (ie, unlicensed frequency bands), including 433Mhz, 868MHz, 915MHz, etc. The LoRa network architecture consists of four parts: terminal nodes, gateways, network servers, and application servers, and application data can be transmitted in both directions.
Lora features
Lora is a physical layer or wireless modulation that creates long-distance communication connections. Compared with traditional FSK technology and short-distance radio frequency technology with insufficient stability and safety, LoRa is based on CSS modulation technology (Chirp Spread Spectrum) while maintaining low power consumption.
The earth has increased the communication range, and CSS technology has been widely used in military and space communications for decades, with the characteristics of long transmission distance and strong anti-interference.
In addition, LoRa technology does not require the construction of base stations, one gateway can control more devices, and the network layout method is more flexible, which can greatly reduce construction costs.
Lora applications
Because of its low power consumption, long transmission distance, flexible networking, and many other characteristics, LoRa fits well with the needs of the Internet of Things fragmentation, low cost, and large connection.
Therefore, it is widely deployed in multiple vertical industries such as smart communities, smart homes, and buildings, smart meters, smart agriculture, smart logistics, etc., with broad prospects.
Transmission distance: up to 2-5 km in towns and 15 km in suburbs.
Working frequency: ISM frequency band includes 433MHz, 868MHz, 915MHz, etc.
Standard: IEEE802. 15.4g.
Modulation method: Based on spread spectrum technology, a variant of linear modulation spread spectrum (CSS), with forwarding error correction (FEC) capability, proprietary patented technology of Semtech.
Capacity: A LoRa gateway can connect to thousands of LoRa nodes.
Battery life: up to 10 years.
Security: AES128 encryption.
Transmission rate: hundreds to tens of Kbps, the lower the rate, the longer the transmission distance. This is like a person picking things, picking more, and not going too far, less can go far.
Since 2014, the first domestic companies have begun to develop LoRa-related products. After 5 years, LoRa has grown from a small wireless technology used in a small area to a de facto standard in the Internet of Things field.
Earlier last year, the Radio Regulatory Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued an opinion on the “Technical Requirements for Micropower Short-distance Radio Transmission Equipment (Draft for Comment)”, which mentioned that the use of the 470-510MHz frequency band is allowed to be used for wireless microphones, and the radio equipment used to transmit sound is specified rather than data;
At the same time, it emphasizes that only a single frequency point is used and cannot be used for networking applications. A draft for comments on the application of LoRa networking has received widespread attention from industry professionals, making the development of the LoRa network in China once faced with difficulties.
In the end, thanks to the efforts of people from all walks of life in the industry, the regulations of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not clearly state that it could not be networked, but that it could be used as a local area network. The restrictions on specific applications were also lifted, thus solving the problem of uncertainty in the development of LoRa in China.
On the other hand, as several major Internet giants Tencent, Google, and Ali have joined the LoRa Alliance one after another, they have introduced strong support to the LoRa ecosystem and jointly deal with the problems faced in the development of LoRa.
Tech giants have entered LoRa and joined the LoRa Alliance. It can be seen that companies hope to use LoRa as an entry point to establish their position in the Internet of Things and Industrial Internet. Two Internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent, use LoRa as an important entry point for their Internet of Things layout, and the main LinkWAN platform and TTN platform are very obvious in driving the upstream and downstream of the industry chain.
In addition, groups such as the Tower, China Unicom, and Radio and Television have also begun to lay out the LoRa industry to further promote its application in various industries.
Lora chips
Judging from the current market structure, thousands of companies in China have participated in the LoRa industry ecology, presenting a pattern of joint participation of large, medium, and small enterprises, traditional enterprises, and Internet companies. The domestic industrial environment provided for the development of LoRa continues to improve, and the strength of the LoRa Alliance itself continues to grow.
According to the information, domestic shipments of LoRa chips will reach tens of millions in 2020. Among them, module and meter manufacturers account for most of the purchase share, and base station manufacturers take second place. In addition, there are a large number of scattered module and terminal manufacturers in China that will directly purchase LoRa chips. Although they are in small batches, the combined scale is still considerable.
Most module, terminal, system, and application manufacturers are neutral to various technologies, and the choice of technology route is mostly a purely market-oriented behavior.
The LoRa chip is an important underlying component that supports the entire industry, but the formation of the entire industrial structure depends on the joint efforts of multiple forces, which have been formed in China.
The flexibility of LoRa-related products has become a consensus in the industry, not only in the ability to independently deploy networks in various environments but also in the ability of various developers to choose multiple platforms and quickly obtain development support.
In the past year, LoRa has also had a large number of industrial applications in vertical fields such as smart cities, smart parks, smart buildings, and smart security. At present, more than 300 application scenarios have been formed in a large number of vertical industries around the world.
From a demand perspective, China’s LoRa chip demand is decentralized.
On the one hand, due to many industries participating in the LoRa industry ecology, it is difficult to form a monopolistic demand side; on the other hand, the entry barriers for corresponding modules and terminals are not high, and many small and medium-sized teams and terminal manufacturers can also quickly launch LoRa hardware Products, this is a fully competitive market.
Lora technology
From a technical ecological point of view, LoRa is a physical layer modulation technology.
It can be used in different protocols, such as LoRaWAN protocol, CLAA network protocol, LoRa private network protocol, and LoRa data transparent transmission. With the different usage agreements, the final product and business form will also be different.
Among them, the LoRaWAN protocol is a low-power wide-area network protocol promoted by the LoRa Alliance. At the same time, the LoRa Alliance standardizes LoRaWAN to ensure that LoRa networks in different countries are interoperable.
The LoRaWAN standard has established a complete ecological chain of LoRa chip-module-sensor-base station or gateway-network service-application service.
From the data results, the data provided by Semtech shows that Lora is in terms of network deployment.
More than 100 network operators in more than 70 countries have deployed LoRa networks, and the market volume of LoRa has maintained rapid growth in recent years. At the same time, the number of LoRa base stations deployed has increased from 70,000 to more than 200,000, which can support approximately 1.2 billion nodes, and the actual deployment of nodes exceeds 90 million.
In terms of scale, Semtech of the United States is the main promoter of the global LoRa technology application.
In order to promote other companies to participate in the LoRa ecosystem, Semtech jointly initiated the establishment of the LoRa Alliance in February 2015 with Actility, Cisco, and IBM. After four years of development, the LoRa Alliance currently has more than 500 members worldwide.
The Chinese market is a very important part of LoRa’s global ecological construction.
In 2018, Internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com all joined the LoRa Alliance as the highest-level members. At the same time, LoRa ecosystem partners such as Carat Technology, Local Broadcasting and Television, Zhejiang Unicom, and Unicom Internet of Things have also begun to actively deploy LoRa networks in various places.
From the perspective of policy orientation, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued the “Technical Requirements for Micropower Short-Range Radio Transmission Equipment (Draft for Solicitation of Comments)”
Although the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “Technical Requirements for Micro-Power Short-Range Radio Transmission Equipment (Draft for Comment)”, the commercial prospects of LoRa became less clear for a while. However, LoRa has not disappeared. With the strong support of the industry’s ecological partners, its vitality has become more tenacious, and the industrial ecology has continued to grow.
LoRa technology is a patent of Semtech, and its LoRa chip products are also exclusively supplied at the beginning of the period, but a single LoRa product will inevitably bring about limitations in product prices and functions.
In 2018, Semtech began to change the traditional product marketing model and authorized IP to make LoRa products for some companies, forming a multi-supplier market supply situation.
Lora chip suppliers took a differentiated route and integrated chips with different functions to meet more differences. The need for customized applications, such as LoRa + GPS to obtain location information, LoRa + BLE to connect and communicate with local near-field devices, and LoRa + security chips to enhance the security of the equipment, to jointly expand the market.
In the future, there may be more LoRa chip suppliers, and it is in the interest of Semtech to expand the market.
Nowadays, we are in the era of the Internet of Things, and with the rapid development of the Internet of Things, wireless communication technology has also been developed.
Among the various connection technologies at the network layer of the Internet of Things, not only the 5G technology with higher speed and stability but also the low-power, long-distance, large-connected LPWAN (Low-PowerWide-AreaNetwork, low-power wide-area network) technology.
And LoRa stands out with its unique flexibility, has been recognized by the Internet of Things community, and is also empowering the transformation of the Internet of Things in smart cities.
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