Whitepapers

Several LPWAN technologies are on the market, but LoRaWAN is the most suitable for IoT applications demanding low power, long-range and ease of deployment. LoRaWAN is the leading LPWAN technology, managed by the LoRa Alliance ® , with a large ecosystem of +500 members, rolled out in +175 countries (including Australia and New Zealand) by +165 network operators. LoRaWAN builds on the fact that not all sensors have to transmit large volumes of information. For example, a sensor might only send a few bytes at a time to indicate the time, its current status and its identification. The rest of the time, the unit can sit idle, conserving battery power and only transmitting regular keep-alive pings back to a central monitoring station. Deployed across a wide area, LoRaWAN can support massive numbers of connected devices – sensors, meters, digital controls and analytic tools – allowing water authorities to deploy sensors where they're needed, without worrying about connectivity. LoRaWAN supports a broad range of use cases including monitoring, metering, and command and control. It is also suitable for heavily connected 'smart city' rollouts, where extensive use of sensors and monitoring devices can keep complex digital infrastructure operating at its peak. LoRaWAN has been designed from the ground up for open access as a global, open standard that supports any application developers might want to build. It is backed by more than 500 LoRa Alliance members. This wide support means water and other utility customers already have access to a broad range of compatible and innova- tive IoT devices, applications and services. A robust LoRaWAN certification program makes sure devices operate as intended. The broad reach and flexibility of LoRaWAN have made it a favoured standard for network operators. It operates in Australia within the framework of the Radiocommunications (Low Interference Potential Devices) Class Licence 2015 as administered by the ACMA. Within Australia and New Zealand, Telecommunications operators, such as NNNCo and Spark, have invested heavily to create far-reaching infrastructure to support all manner of applications, providing a low-risk solution as well as enabling interoperability across many different brands of gateways, endpoint devices, cloud network servers, development kits Case Study: Using LoRaWAN ® and Tanks to Solve Water Scarcity on Remote Islands – New Zealand Water scarcity is an ongoing challenge in remote and island communities in New Zealand, where there is a lack of reticulated water as well as pollution of rainwater catchments due to rising sea levels. Communities often run out of water without warning, particularly during dry seasons when increased consumption and reduced rainfall pose dual threats. To improve the water resilience of these communities, New Zealand IoT pioneer, IoT Ventures, has developed TankView, a remote water level and rainfall monitoring solution that regularly measures water levels and communicates them via a LoRaWAN network to a centralised monitoring app. Figure 3: LoRaWAN® – An Open Standard Read more www.lora-alliance.org p.7

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