What is LoRaWAN®?

LoRaWAN® is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol for connecting and controlling low powered field devices within a 5 km radius hotspot to a gateway. LoRaWAN®’s usage has accelerated in the past 10 years and there are now over 270 million LoRaWAN® devices in operation worldwide. LoRaWAN® offers a number of advantages for industrial communications over traditional wired, Line-of-Sight or M2M satellite solutions.

Pros:

• Up to 4000 field devices can be provided with cloud connectivity from a single LoRaWAN® Gateway
• LoRaWAN® sensors or SCADA to LoRaWAN® converter nodes (read more) have very long battery life and do not need solar panels for autonomous operation of up to 10 years
• Remote deployments can utilize a single satellite link located at the Gateway (read more about the MF GATEWAY) versus many satellite links located at each asset
• There are many new LoRaWAN® sensors entering the market, enabling new use cases
• A LoRaWAN® Gateway can be used for providing connectivity to multiple use cases, making it useful as requirements evolve

Cons:

However LoRaWAN® has two major shortcomings for its use in remote monitoring of industrial assets over satellite backhaul.

• The LoRaWAN® protocol assumes the gateway has a ‘free’ and relatively high bandwidth connection (Fiber, 4G etc) to the cloud. An off-the-shelf LoRaWAN® Gateway can generate tens of MBs of data per day over this connection, just as a laptop does with routine firmware updates etc. 
• The LoRaWAN® protocol is designed to fit inside the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem which largely uses and assumes cloud based resources that present challenges to integrating LoRaWAN® into private networks used in industrial communications. 

The MinFarm Solution:

MinFarm products use the MinFarm optimized satellite protocol architecture that has been developed in cooperation with the European Space Agency to optimize how LoRaWAN® operates over L-band satellite links and to enable its usage on private networks. 

MinFarm Optimized Satellite Protocol Architecture

MinFarm products use the MinFarm optimized satellite protocol architecture that has been developed in cooperation with the European Space Agency to optimize how LoRaWAN® operates over L-band satellite links and to enable its usage on private networks. 

The MinFarm protocol is an optimized protocol for reliable and low-cost data transfer over small L-band satellite terminals. L-band satellite terminals offer many advantages over larger VSAT terminals, however they can present unusual interfaces (non-IP packet data etc), higher latencies, and lower bandwidth. To get the best of both worlds (small satellite hardware and fast data transfer), MinFarm in cooperation with the European Space Agency has developed a unique software protocol and architecture to overcome the data transfer limitations of small L-band terminals while transmitting data from remote field devices. This MinFarm optimized protocol architecture has the following useful features for using L-band satellite to support field device connectivity in an industrial communication environment:

• Any LoRaWAN, SCADA (read more) or CCTV (read more) device can send uplinks and downlinks reliably and at a low cost
• A simple to use Dashboard (read more) for configuring and managing field devices and satellite deployments
• Well documented API (read more) for integrating your field deployments into existing application endpoints and third party sensor management tools (The Things Industries, private LNSs etc.)
• Defense in depth security with end to end encryption (read more)
• Private network hosting options available (read more)