Toward a Versatile IoT Communication Infrastructure

— The IoT can lead to fundamental developments in health, education, urbanization, agriculture, industry, and other areas. Regarding the variety of different end-user applications and needs, developing a versatile communication network that can support such diverse and heterogeneous applications is necessary to decrease the implementation costs than developing a dedicated communication network for each application. LoRa is a type of LPWAN networks that is supported by LoRa Alliance and due to long-range communication and low power and reasonable cost, IoT has become the main goal of establishing LoRa. LoRaWAN covers the protocol and architecture of the system on top of the LoRa physical layer. The LoRa physical layer uses proprietary CSS modulation. This modulation operates below the noise level and is resistant to fading, interference, and blocking attacks, and is difficult to decode. LoRa operates in the unlicensed frequency band below 1GHz with different frequencies in different geographical areas. LoRa is much more useful for IoT applications than short-range protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth, despite limitations in data transfer speeds and QoS. Therefore, in this manuscript, considering the importance and advantages of LoRa, this protocol is introduced and its various network aspect, importance, and application are examined. Then, a solution based on the cognitive radio technique is presented for QoS improvement to utilize the LoRa technology as a kind of versatile communication infrastructure for IoT.