WWAN and WLAN IoT technologies
WWAN technologies include cellular LTE and 5G, as well as some unlicensed Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies such as LoRaWAN, whereas WLAN includes the prevalent Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies.Well over 80% of the connectivity in current IoT solutions are the WLAN and WPAN technologies, which are critical parts of the IoT ecosystem and will be reviewed next. We will cover licensed cellular LPWA in detail in Chapter 4, Leveraging Cellular IoT Technologies.
There are four primary WLAN/WPAN unlicensed technologies used in most enterprise IoT solutions. These are as follows:
- Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
- Wi-Fi
- LoRa and LoRaWAN
- LR-WPAN (IEEE 802.15.4)
We will start our review of WLAN/WPAN technologies with Bluetooth/BLE, which is the most prevalent WPAN technology.
Bluetooth/BLE
Bluetooth is a ubiquitous, short-range, standardized WPAN technology developed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth...