The LoRa Alliance’s LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) made for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed for long-range, low-power operation with sensors and controls that work off of batteries or energy-harvesting devices. It has applications in transportation and logistics, smart buildings, smart cities, and agriculture. For example, Vinduino is an open-source, LoRaWAN-based solution for wineries that want to track the soil moisture in their vineyards. It also incorporates an Arduino board and is programmed using Python. LoRa was originally developed by Semtech.
The recent LoRa conference in Philadelphia was host to gateway and hardware vendors as well as service providers like Comcast that announced its machineQ LoRa service. It was able to cover most of the city with only three gateways.
LoRa’s two-key encryption security system works well for multi-tenant services like machineQ. One key is used to encrypt and authenticate exchanges with the network infrastructure. The other is for communication with the data service. This allows Comcast to have access to the infrastructure communication, but not the application data that is encrypted using the other key.