The LoRa Alliance this week launched its formal roadmap, highlighting LoRaWan’s evolution from building and interconnecting networks through its focus on making the technology faster and easier to deploy, to the planned development of an open standard for IoT communications.

“LoRaWan is a purpose-built networking technology to support massive IoT,” said Donna Moore, CEO of the LoRa Alliance. “The members of the LoRa Alliance have been diligent in their work to lay the foundation strategically evolving LoRaWan to achieve the significant scaling that is taking place in IoT. Not only is our technology best of breed and proven across multiple multimillion-sensor deployments, but it is also backed by the largest ecosystem with the greatest number and diversity of certified devices. Further, it offers the widest variety of deployment options across terrestrial networks and satellite NTNs, including hybrid networking approaches. As such, it is the only LPWAN that can address the requirements of any organisation looking to deploy large-scale, low-power IoT today.”

The roadmap outlines the planned enhancements of several critical features already incorporated in the LoRaWan standard.

On expanding addressable markets, it:

• Enhances connectivity for NTN LoRaWan through, for example, further optimisation of long-range, frequency hopping spread spectrum (LR-FHSS), which enables LoRaWan to far surpass the projected network-capacity requirements of massive IoT.
• Makes relay enhancements that increase LoRaWan signals’ reach in noisy or physically challenging environments to allow sensors to be deployed anywhere.
• Adds fast and low-power network discovery, which offers new deployment options where coverage is not permanent, such as mobile gateways, allowing walk-by or drive-by applications and adding value for key markets such as utilities, where LoRaWan dominates in terms of deployment volumes.

On hyper scalability, it can simplify deployments with easier device profile management and device migration. It carries GS1-compliant identifiers, such as RFIDs, barcodes and electronic product codes over LoRaWan, to enable devices connected via LoRaWan to be used for product and asset identification. And it facilitates LoRaWan end-device onboarding by LoRaWans with automated device profile downloads, which automatically request the device profiles from online repositories using a standard API, building on prior work of LoRa Alliance QR code.

For core network management, it strengthens device interoperability by standardising the application server and gateway interfaces.

It can also drive customer confidence through the addition of firmware updates over the air and relay to LoRaWan certification testing, allowing end-device manufacturers to validate the performance of these features.

End users become confident in cross-vendor device interoperability by adding interoperability testing into the LoRaWan certification test suite. This testing will validate that devices from different manufacturers can effectively exchange and make use of each other’s information.

Finally, it can introduce crypto-agility to LoRaWan, so the variety of current and future crypto-suites can be used as add-ons with the LoRaWan link layer without having to evolve the latter.

As IoT moves from millions to billions of connections, as is forecast in the next few years, network scalability is a key consideration that is addressed in the current standard and slated for future enhancements. Smart metering is one key area where LoRaWan has established a market-leading position with the current specification delivering abundant network capacity to address market requirements. Recognising the growth in IoT connections that will be enabled by satellite and other NTNs, the alliance developed LR-FHSS for massive, global LoRaWan connectivity. As part of its planned roadmap, the LoRa Alliance will continue to enhance and expand the standard based on market needs and new use cases.

One example that illustrates LoRaWan’s existing high-capacity capability is the Zenner network (zenner-connect.com), with nearly 7.5 million sensors running on more than 100,000 gateways in 15 countries to support energy providers, the housing industry, cities and municipalities, municipal utilities, and industrial operations. As this example shows, the LoRaWan standard can address today’s IoT capacity requirements.

The LoRa Alliance (lora-alliance.org) is an open, non-profit association formed in 2015. Its members collaborate and share expertise to develop and promote the LoRaWan standard for secure, carrier-grade IoT LPWAN connectivity.