ABSTRACT
In recent years, advances in both low-power integrated circuits and general electronics have enabled an increase in applications that capture information from the environment. The information is acquired by means of small sensors that rely on small batteries or that harvest energy from the sun, heat, bio-sources or elsewhere. It is predicted that in the near future, the majority of objects will have a wireless connection, resulting in billions of connected devices, forming a real swarm of sensors. In order to efficiently transmit the information acquired from these sensors, many different wireless protocols have been studied and developed, including proprietary and open-standard ones. Examples of open-standard protocols are Sigfox, Lorawan, and Nb-IoT. This chapter gives a detailed explanation of each of these three protocols and compares them in terms of area coverage, power budget, data transmission capacity, and other criteria needed to select them appropriately for applications.
