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LoRa

LoRa has been surging in popularity in recent years across many industries including agriculture and smart cities. This is your guide to the technology, helping you decide if LoRa is the right fit for your project.

What is LoRa?

LoRa is a proprietary wireless communication method developed and owned by Semtech, a semiconductor company. It uses Chirp Spread Spectrum modulation to achieve transmission distances going up to tens of kilometers in the right conditions. It’s even been reflected off the moon.

Semtech are the sole proprietors of LoRa, which means you’ll be using Semtech’s chips directly or modules built with them.

The LoRa Alliance, an industry consortium, manages the LoRaWAN protocol specification, which is the standardized network layer that runs on top of LoRa radio technology.

Why Teams Choose LoRa

The appeal of LoRa comes down to two significant advantages that are difficult to match with other wireless technologies.

The first is ultra-low power consumption. Sabre’s own experience with LoRa has yielded up to 5 years or more on two alkaline AA batteries for an active sensor reporting multiple times per day. For deployments of hundreds or thousands of sensors across hundreds of sites, technicians are making fewer routine visits just to change batteries.

LoRa’s second offering is outstanding range. With clear line of sight, LoRa signals can travel over 10 kilometers. Dense urban environments with buildings and interference can still result in 2-3 kilometers range. This makes it especially suited to deployments across large areas, reducing the number of on-site base stations (often called gateways) required.

The catch with LoRa is data rate. LoRa is designed for small payloads like sensor readings, GPS coordinates, or status updates. If your application needs video streaming, large file transfers or real-time data streams, LoRa may not be suitable.

Regional Considerations

LoRa operates in various unlicensed sub-GHz radio bands around the world. While this does mean there are no licensing fees to use radio band, it comes with the downside that regional regulations vary across the world.

In Europe, LoRa typically operates around a few 868 MHz bands with strict duty-cycle[^1] limitations. In North America, 915 MHz is used with different channel configurations and a 400ms dwell time[^2] limit per transmission.

Asian countries use various bands including 433 MHz and 923 MHz, each with their own regulatory constraints.

Practically, this means a device designed for Europe won’t work in the United States without hardware modifications. If your project spans multiple regions, you’ll need to account for these variations in your hardware specifications from the start.

This is made far easier by choosing off-the-shelf radio modules, readily available for LoRaWAN, which handle the LoRa communications, usually only requiring an antenna. Many of these models behave similarly to a cellular modem. One example is MultiTech’s xDot range.

Bespoke Implementations

It is possible to implement LoRa into your own proprietary system directly, which requires designing components such as the radio circuitry, network protocol and security. For projects with simpler communication needs, like local connected devices.

A bespoke LoRa communications setup may be for you if your project:

The enemy of bespoke applications is complexity, which brings with it expense and time. For example, adding cloud communications immediately adds:

To name a few areas.

You must also consider whether LoRa is the correct technology for your application. At closer ranges, Bluetooth and Zigbee offer similar low-power consumption and work ubiquitously in the 2.4GHz band, meaning one device worldwide. LoRa beats them in rural and industrial environments with sites requiring hundreds of meters of coverage, but its benefits show less in places like residential homes, where range is less of a concern.

LoRaWAN: The Standardized Network

LoRaWAN is the network protocol built on top of LoRa radio technology. It defines how devices join networks, how messages are secured, how data gets routed from your sensors through gateways to network servers, and ultimately to your application. It’s maintained by the LoRa Alliance, which means there’s third-party certified devices, gateways, and network servers that interoperate.

Choosing LoRaWAN makes sense when you need scalable network infrastructure with security built in. The protocol handles encryption, device authentication, and network management out of the box.

There are public networks you can connect to (like The Things Network or commercial offerings from telecom operators) and the option to deploy private networks if you need full control or have security requirements that demand it. Public networks use existing infrastructure, which can save costs in urban environments, but does limit you to locations where this infrastructure exists.

The LoRaWAN cloud ecosystem is mature, with open-source offerings like the Things Stack and ChirpStack if you want full control or complete commercial offerings from LORIOT, Amazon AWS and others.

LoRaWAN does come with overhead:

For very simple point-to-point applications, this might be more infrastructure than necessary.

Making the Decision

LoRa serves as a staple communication method of the wide-area IoT connectivity space. You can join the community of mature infrastructure and standards through LoRaWAN or leverage the technology in your own fashion. Where long-range small data is concerned, it’s hard to beat.

Where LoRa may not fit is when you cannot take full advantage of the benefits. If your application does not cover wide areas and falls within range of 2.4GHz, the arguments for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Zigbee become much stronger. The data rate limitations narrow future project scope and must be carefully considered early on.

Where do We Come In?

Sabre has worked with LoRa since the advent of Semtech’s original hardware transceivers in 2013. We have multiple successful client projects still in-field today, with over 600,000 deployed Sabre-designed IoT devices in the field communicating over both bespoke LoRa and LoRaWAN.

We offer services at every stage of your project from conception to in-life support, with our involvement tailored to suit your needs.