Future Industrial Applications: Exploring LPWAN-Driven IoT Protocols
Mahbubul Islam, Hossain Md. Mubashshir Jamil, Samiul Ahsan Pranto, Rupak Kumar Das, Al Amin, Arshia Khan
TL;DR
The paper provides a structured comparison of IoT wireless protocols, focusing on LPWANs (LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M) and Z-Wave alongside cellular options, and evaluates them across data rate, security, range, energy, cost, and QoS. It demonstrates that LPWAN-based protocols offer superior energy efficiency, wide coverage, and cost-effectiveness for future IIoT deployments, while cellular options excel in higher data rates and lower latency in specific scenarios. The work further maps protocol suitability to a broad set of IIoT applications, including smart cities, logistics, farming, energy management, and manufacturing, providing practical guidance for industrial deployments. It also identifies open research issues such as multi-protocol integration, gateway resilience, access mechanisms, and data management challenges that must be addressed to enable scalable, secure IIoT ecosystems.
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring about the next industrial revolution in Industry 4.0. The communication aspect of IoT devices is one of the most critical factors in choosing the suitable device for the suitable usage. So far, the IoT physical layer communication challenges have been met with various communications protocols that provide varying strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, most of them are wireless protocols due to the sheer number of device requirements for IoT. This paper summarizes the network architectures of some of the most popular IoT wireless communications protocols. It also presents a comparative analysis of critical features, including power consumption, coverage, data rate, security, cost, and Quality of Service (QoS). This comparative study shows that Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) based IoT protocols (LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M ) are more suitable for future industrial applications because of their energy efficiency, high coverage, and cost efficiency. In addition, the study also presents an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application perspective on the suitability of LPWAN protocols in a particular scenario and addresses some open issues that need to be researched. Thus, this study can assist in deciding the most suitable protocol for an industrial and production field.