The LoRaWAN and mioty radio protocols under test

LoRaWAN and mioty are two LPWAN (low-power wide-area networks) communication protocols [1, 2]. They promise being capable of sending small datagrams over a long distance at low energy cost and thus they seem well suited for battery-powered industrial sensors.

At ifm, we validated those claims experimentally in an industrial environment. The present report documents those experiments, in which we compared LoRaWAN and mioty regarding their robustness at long communication distances and their energy consumption. We found that mioty  shows higher robustness at a lower energy consumption than LoRaWAN.

We conducted the experiments at ifm electronic GmbH, Tettnang, Germany, a shared R&D and manufacturing campus. We deployed LoRaWAN and mioty devices at various locations on the campus and send a predefined number of packets to a base station mounted on the roof at a fixed location. We metered packet loss and energy consumption.

To ensure the comparability of the results for LoRaWAN and MIOTY we utilized completely identical hardware for LoRaWAN and mioty devices as well as a shared gateway/based station and communications path to the cloud.

The report details the design and procedure of the experiments and provides a thorough discussion of the results.

 

Would you like to contribute to those topics?
Have a look at our job offering here:
https://jobs.ifm.com/stelle/stelle-softwareingenieur-vorentwicklung-m-w-d-_2328.aspx

Disclaimer: ifm is a full member of the mioty alliance.

References
[1] https://lora-alliance.org/
[2] https://mioty-alliance.com/