LoRa vs LoRaWAN, What’s the difference?

NOTE: some material OF THIS ARTICLE WAS quoted from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

LoRa Alliance – Homepage

LoRa describes the lower physical layer. LoRaWAN is one of the numerous protocols that were developed to describe the upper layers of the network. You can read more information from below article and trace to lora alliance organization website in links below to get the reading documents.

 

What Is The Difference Between LoRa And LoRaWAN® Networks?

LPWAN (Low-power wide-area network)

It is a wireless wide-area network technology that interconnects low-bandwidth, battery-powered IoT devices with low bit rates over long ranges.

LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) defines the communication protocol and system architecture. LoRaWAN is an official standard of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), ITU-T Y.4480. The continued development of the LoRaWAN protocol is managed by the open, non-profit LoRa Alliance, of which Semtech is a founding member.

LoraWan is the communication protocol and system architecture for the network. However, LoRa physical layer enables the long-range communication link. According to the documents from LoRa Alliance®, the protocol and network architecture impact the most on the battery lifetime, the network capacity, the quality of service, the security and the variety of applications served by the network.

One area where LoRaWAN differs from other network specs is that it uses a star architecture, with a central node to which all other nodes are connected and gateways serve as the transparent bridge relaying messages between end-devices and a central network server in the backend. Gateways are connected to the network server via standard IP connections while end-devices use single-hop wireless communication to one or many gateways. All end-point communication is bi-directional, and supports multicast, enabling software upgrades over the air. According to the LoRa-Alliance, the non-profit organization who created LoRaWAN specifications, this helps preserve battery life and achieve long-range connection.

Check the link to get experts documents

https://resources.lora-alliance.org/getting-started-with-lorawan/what-is-lorawan 

LoRaWAN is a cloud-based media access control (MAC) layer protocol but acts mainly as a network layer protocol to manage communication between end-node devices and LPWAN gateways, as a steering protocol, maintained by the LoRa Alliance. LoRaWAN specification version 1.0 was released in June 2015.

LoRa

LoRa (from “Long Range”, sometimes abbreviated as “LR”) is a physical proprietary radio communication technique. It is based on spread spectrum modulation techniques derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology. It was developed by Cycleo, a company of Grenoble, France, and patented in 2014. In March 2012, Cycleo was acquired by the US company Semtech. read more from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

The LoRaWAN protocol is based on the LoRa radio modulation method. you can understand it as a low-power wide-area networking protocol. This protocol manages communication between end-node IoT devices and network gateways and connects devices to the internet via wireless connections. LoRaWAN is a point-to-multipoint networking protocol with much less power consumption mechanism. It’s an energy saving radio waves that can interact with LoRaWAN gateways to provide functions like encryption and identification.

Summary:

LoRa = physical layer modulation

LoRaWAN = communication protocol and architecture

Together they provide the complete solution including both the long-range connectivity and flexible network communication architecture.

This article has quoted the knowledge from LoRa Alliance® website, Get more knowledge from LoRa Alliance®.

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