On the Combination of LR-WPAN and LPWA Technologies to Provide a Collaborative Wireless Solution for Diverse IoT

Nowadays, Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies attract a lot of attention in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The main reason is because they are able to connect devices that are much further apart than in traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and with very low power consumption. Indeed, LPWA networks are being deployed and, at the same time, they coexist in the current paradigm with all kinds of wireless systems for IoT. In this context of heterogeneity, this work presents the options of combination of LPWA technologies with those used in WSNs so that the systems are designed together and take profit of the best of each one, and total performances are optimized by a proper design of their configuration parameters. A solution to combine IEEE 802.15.4g and Narrow Band-IoT (NB-IoT) technologies is explored and implemented. Through the addition of nodes with double connectivity, it is possible to optimize the communication links using several merit figures. Three possible NB-IoT transceivers have been tested with satisfactory results.