With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, higher requirements are placed on wireless communication technology. And LPWAN (low-power Wide-Area Network), which is designed for low-bandwidth, low-power, long-distance, and mass-connected IoT applications, is also rapidly emerging.
Lora NB-IoT is a typical representative and the two most promising low-power wide-area network communication technologies.
Lora NB-IoT, who has the advantage?
Lora NB-IoT development status
With the rapid development in recent years, Lora NB-IoT has made considerable progress in wide coverage. NB-IoT has now completed the coverage of more than 300 cities across the country, and the number of terminal connections has exceeded 50 million, and every year with an increase of tens of millions, it covers various industries including smart cities, environmental protection, agriculture, medical care, logistics and so on.
As a technology that appeared earlier than NB-IoT, Lora has also received attention from some vertical industry markets. At the same time, some Internet companies choose to promote the development of LoRa technology, intending to use LoRa technology to open up a new path for IoT.
Today, both parties need to find new growth scenarios, and the smart home and industrial Internet markets are on the ascendant. Both the breadth and depth of the market’s future development are worth investing in various technologies for vigorous development.
Therefore, whoever can occupy a leading position in the market, can obtain more support from the industry chain, and form a more complete ecosystem, will be able to obtain greater wins in the future.
Lora NB-IoT, which is also a wide-area Internet of Things technology, has inherent advantages in this short-distance coverage scenario. It has a wide coverage area, low power consumption, a powerful management platform, a wealth of terminal types, and a large number of upstream and downstream industries in the industry chain. stand by.
In 2018, only 150 million LPWAN links were deployed. By 2023, LoRa NB-IoT is expected to occupy 86% of all LPWAN links. Among them, LoRa may be adopted by more private networks, while NB-IoT is the main application in the public network.
Features of LoRa
The biggest feature of LoR is that it can travel farther than other wireless methods under the same power consumption, realizing the unification of low power consumption and long-distance. The LoRa network is mainly composed of base stations (or gateways), servers, LoRa terminals, and the Internet of Things. The cloud consists of four parts, which are characterized by the two-way transmission of data between the application side and the server-side.
The advantages of LoRa are ultra-low power consumption and multi-channel data transmission, which increase the system data capacity. The gateway and terminal system can support ranging and positioning, which is very suitable for location-sensitive applications.
Lora has the support of Ali, Tencent, Google, etc., and can directly obtain the ecological support surrounding these leading Internet players.
It is foreseeable that in the future indoor scenes, LoRa NB-IoT will undoubtedly rely on their respective ecology for long-term battles.
Features of NB-IoT
NB-IoT has obvious advantages in bandwidth and cost. It is built on a cellular network and only consumes about 180KHz of bandwidth. It can directly deploy UMTS networks, LTE networks and GSM networks, and it is easy to upgrade the network.
At the same time, compared to the 4G network, it supports a long standby time, efficient connection, and the battery life of networked devices is very high.
Advantages of NB-IoT applications
It is precisely because of the low cost and low power consumption of NB-IoT technology that it is widely used in areas such as positioning, water meters, and parking. For example, there are built-in NB-IoT modules in shared bicycles to realize the Internet of Things communication.
More importantly, NB-IoT has a natural advantage for indoor scene coverage by relying on operators. The determined spectrum resources can be covered by the operator’s original room distribution system, and NB-IoT devices can be introduced into the user’s home through integration packages and device experience. It is widely used in industries such as smart homes, smart retail, and smart city.
Although NB-IoT has obvious advantages, the current development situation in China is that it lacks a unified open industry platform. At the same time, standard, chip, network, and related application layer manufacturers are mainly small and medium-sized enterprises, and they need to strengthen their alliance strength and build a strong of ecology.
Comparison of LoRa NB-IoT
Comparison of LoRa NB-IoT from Frequency band, cost, quality of service
NB-IoT and cellular communication use authorized frequency bands provided by operators. Because they are specially allocated frequency bands, there is relatively little interference.
Although a certain communication fee will be charged in actual applications, it will also provide better signal service quality, security, and certification accordingly. Moreover, the construction of base stations for current cellular networks is more conducive to rapid and large-scale applications.
Lora works in the unlicensed frequency band of Sub-1G, and network equipment can be established without application. Relatively speaking, the network architecture is simple, and there is no need to pay additional communication fees in actual applications, but because it is an open frequency band, the actual application is very wide and easy to Interference from other devices in the same frequency band.
Communication distance
The signal coverage of NB-IOT depends on its base station density and link budget. With the help of early resource advantages, it can achieve wider coverage and better QoS than LoRa, and NB-IoT itself has a link budget of up to 164dB. The transmission distance can reach 15km～20km.
Lora uses chirp spread spectrum modulation technology, which not only maintains the same low power consumption characteristics as FSK (Frequency Shift Keying), but also significantly increases the communication transmission distance, thereby improving network efficiency and anti-interference ability, that is, different spread spectrum sequences The terminals will not interfere with each other when using the same frequency to transmit at the same time.
The gateway developed on this basis can realize multi-channel parallel data reception, which greatly expands the network capacity. The transmission distance of the LoRa node can reach a coverage range of 12-15km (in the open suburban environment, the transmission distance in the urban environment will decrease).
Low power consumption, battery life
Low power consumption is one of the core indicators of the Internet of Things. Regarding battery life, two important factors need to be considered: protocol content and node current consumption.
The nodes of the NB-IoT synchronization protocol must be networked regularly, and the required peak current is several orders of magnitude higher than that of LoRa with nonlinear modulation. Especially in the process of requesting the base station to access the server after waking up, there will be a large number of batteries power consumption.
Lora is an asynchronous communication method based on the ALOHA protocol, so accurate sleep time can be set according to specific application requirements to achieve the purpose of making full use of battery power.
Equipment cost
For terminal nodes, LoRa is simpler and easier to develop than NB-IoT. The protocol and modulation mechanism of NB-IoT is more complex, requiring more complex circuit design and more cost. At the same time, NB-IoT uses authorized frequency bands. A certain fee is charged for communication.
Through the above analysis, the biggest difference of LoRa NB-IoT is that NB-IoT works on the cellular authorized frequency band and the network is deployed and maintained by the operator. In order to ensure normal communication and work with the base station, it is necessary for the product to effectively verify its functions before actual deployment.
Lora is a non-cellular network, and the non-disclosure of its standard details makes it difficult to generate standard signals for verification.
Lora can use traditional signal towers, industrial base stations, and even portable home gateways. It is cheap to construct base stations and home gateways.
In terms of cost, the cost of the LoRa wireless module and the NB-IoT wireless module is not much different, but the hidden cost of NB-IoT is obviously higher than that of the LoRa wireless module.
At present, Lora NB-IoT is still in the initial stage of development and requires input and joint development from all parties.
When large-scale deployment becomes possible, the module cost of Lora NB-IoT will also be further reduced.
As far as technical solutions are concerned, Lora NB-IoT will definitely be parallel in a short period of time. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. It is difficult to say who is overwhelming.
If it is affected by factors other than technical solutions, such as the innovation of profit models, the close integration with the application industry, and the influence of the industry, both may take the lead in occupying the market.
In fact, the two LPWAN technologies, Lora NB-IoT, have the characteristics of wide coverage, multiple connections, low speed, low cost, and low power consumption. Both are suitable for low-power IoT applications and are actively expanding their own ecosystems.
