New Advances in LPWAN Technology Improves Connectivity in Urban Areas
LPWAN communications technology is nothing new when it comes to connecting IoT devices. One of the major impediments that has been hindering widespread adoption of it though, is the inconsistency and latency in throughput being experienced in urban areas. Last month at SIGCOMM 2017, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers introduced a new technology named Choir. Choir is a system that overcomes the challenges pertaining to density and range of urban LPWANs. And they do this despite the limited capabilities of base station and client hardware. In fact, it is the very weaknesses and imperfections in the nodes themselves that Choir takes advantage of in order to deliver these improvements. At the same time, Choir helps provide another important benefit to the LPWAN ecosystem. As a result of the decreased need for continual retransmission, the battery life of the LPWAN nodes is significantly improved as well.
A team of researchers has developed a new system, Choir, that can overcome some of the drawbacks of low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs). LPWANs are a promising communication option for the Internet of Things (IoT), which requires low-power devices that can nonetheless send data at regular intervals.However, LPWANs are difficult to deploy in dense urban environments because of increased interference and attenuation of signals.
