Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1423217
Wireless Broadband Alliance & LoRa Alliance ® Proprietary Copyright © 2020 Wireless Broadband Alliance & LoRa Alliance Report Title: Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN ® Trials Issue Date: November 2020 Version: Final 22 4. Conclusion and Key Learnings As frequently highlighted in many IoT papers, the key challenge of IoT is to unlock the benefits of the data through analytics and also to serve use cases in different verticals. It raises the question of how to merge valuable information coming from Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN networks. The interconnection may happen at multiple levels, as illustrated in the 8 trials presented in this white paper. • Silicon level: dual/multi-radio access technology (RAT) modules embedding Wi-Fi and LoRa chipsets on the same silicon or module to address combined use cases. Location services mentioned in this document are a good example of implementation. We see this Interconnection option in Actility, Kerlink, and Lacuna Space use cases. • Edge compute level: It means that LoRaWAN network server and Wi-Fi IoT controller functions are collocated on-premises (gateway, MEC, fog). This architecture makes sense in scenarios where the deployment is in remote areas where back-haul latency is an issue and Cloud functionalities can be directly backhauled through satellite connection or scenarios where decision is time-sensitive and data needs to be processed locally. As mentioned earlier, LoRaWAN gateways and Wi-Fi Access Points can also be embedded in the same hardware. Charter Communications, Simplycity, and Boingo use cases aim to collocate Wi-Fi Access Points and LoRaWAN Gateways when possible and relevant. • Cloud/platform level: application servers are able to manage payloads coming from different IoT technologies and process and store this data. This option to leverage multi-network deployments while collecting data on the same IoT platform have been chosen by all contributors and became a wide IoT trend. Through these trials, we showed that LoRaWAN and Wi-Fi collaboration can address a large and diverse set of use cases based on the above types of architectural choices. One particular use case addressed the expansion of Wi-Fi OpenRoaming™ to LoRaWAN. This topic deserves to be further investigated in the next months to see how it will support LoRaWAN ecosystem interconnections. Based on the success of the Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN trials, we expect to publish a second version of Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Trials with more use cases in 2021, as well as bringing more data on the eight already completed.