Whitepapers

LoRa Alliance ® and LoRaWAN ® are registered trademarks. Used with permission. ©2020 LoRa Alliance ® www.lora-alliance.org WHY LORAWAN ® IS THE FOUNDATION FOR SMART BUILDING SUCCESS to select from. This paper explains how the smart buildings market is developing and the various innovations that are driving its growth and compares LoRaWAN ® technology to legacy approaches as the connectivity foundation for this and future generations of smart buildings. MARKET INSIGHTS Traction towards large-scale IoT deployments is starting to become evident and the smart buildings segment is predicted to be one of the fastest growing segments for IoT. Recent research from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight has found that the installed base of sensors, actuators, modules, gateways and other connected devices deployed as part of IoT-based building automation in smart and connected commercial buildings was an estimated 151 million units worldwide at the end of 2018. The firm says that it expects this figure to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33% between 2018 and 2022, when the installed base will reach 483 million units. Importantly for LPWAN, the firm says only 4.5 million of these devices were connected via cellular networks in 2018 and is not expected to exceed 19.4 million in 2022. This market therefore will be dominated by non-cellular connections, such as LoRaWAN, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Bluetooth Low Energy. In a survey of 1,600 enterprise IoT projects, research firm IoT Analytics also uncovered that the smart buildings category is an area enjoying strong growth. Of the live projects it analyzed, the firm found that smart city initiatives make up the largest part of identified projects (23%), followed by projects implemented in industrial settings (17%) and projects evolving around connected buildings (12%). Commenting on the findings, IoT Analytics' managing director Knud Lasse Lueth, said: "New IoT projects are emerging across the board, however we have noted that projects centered on the themes of smart city and smart building have increased more than others." The firm also projects substantial growth in LPWAN device deployment in the period 2017-2023 (shown in Figure 1 below), demonstrating that LoRaWAN is part of a fast- growing segment of the IoT connectivity landscape, which also includes the rapidly-growing smart buildings segment. WHAT IS LoRaWAN? LoRaWAN is an LPWAN protocol specifically designed for IoT. Its power management and long range are ideal for connecting battery operated "things" wirelessly to the internet in localized, regional, national or even global networks. It targets key Internet of Things (IoT) requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services. LoRaWAN operates in unlicensed bandwidth allowing it to be deployed without a license in both public and private networks in much the same manner as Wi-Fi. LoRaWAN technology has amassed several hundred known uses cases for smart cities, smart homes and buildings, smart agriculture, smart metering, smart supply chain and logistics, and more. With 105 million devices, LoRaWAN is the most widely adopted LPWAN technology to date and offers a vibrant ecosystem of device and application developers. Key features of LoRaWAN include: extreme immunity to interference allowing it to effectively operate in the unlicensed band and to easily cover several floors of a building with a simple gateway; low power to enable long battery life of up to ten years, security enabled via end-to-end encryption, mutual authentication and integrity protection; and standardization to ensure network to device interoperability.

• Cover