24 Sep 2019

WBA and LoRa Alliance highlight potential synergies from Wi-Fi/LoRaWAN networks

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and the LoRa Alliance have released a white paper – “Wi-Fi & LoRaWAN Deployment Synergies: Expanding Addressable Use Cases For The Internet of Things”, which highlights the business opportunities that are created when Wi-Fi networks that are traditionally built to support critical IoT are merged with LoRaWAN networks.

According to the paper, when used together Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN networks optimise a number of IoT use cases including:

Smart Building/Smart Hospitality: There are two scenarios for convergence of Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN, including accurate asset tracking and location services for indoor or near buildings, as well as on-demand streaming for devices with battery limitations.

Residential Connectivity: The deployment of LoRaWANpicocells that leverage Wi-Fi backhaul to home hubs to expand coverage of home services to the neighbourhood. These “neighbourhood IoT networks” can support new geolocation services, while also serving as a communication backbone for demand-response services.

Automotive & Smart Transportation: Currently, Wi-Fi is used for passenger entertainment and access control, while LoRaWAN is used for fleet tracking and vehicle maintenance. Hybrid use cases identified in the paper include location and video streaming.

The concept of on-demand streaming in this context is worth going into in more detail. The idea is that low power LoRaWAN sensors (such as motion sensors) could be used to automatically activate a camera in response to pre-defined criteria, and the video feed from the camera is then streamed over Wi-Fi. Similarly, the data from a large number of different LoRaWAN sensors (motion, sound, vibration, etc.,) can be backhauled over Wi-Fi for aggregation in the cloud to enable more precise decision-making.