One technology cannot serve all of the projected applications and volumes for IoT.

WiFi and BTLE are widely adopted standards and serve the applications related to communicating personal devices quite well. Cellular technology is a great fit for applications that need high data throughput and have a power source. LPWAN offers multi-year battery lifetime and is designed for sensors and applications that need to send small amounts of data over long distances a few times per hour from varying environments.

The most critical factors in a LPWAN are:

• Network architecture

• Communication range

• Battery lifetime or low power

• Robustness to interference

• Network capacity (maximum number of nodes in a network)

• Network security

• One-way vs two-way communication

• Variety of applications served