The role of low-power wide-area network technologies in Internet of Things: A systematic and comprehensive review

With the quick progress of wireless technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognized as the main part of daily people's lives that makes their life more convenient by utilizing a diverse range of smart devices. Over the last decade, various useful and forthcoming application fields have been developed by taking advantage of the IoT concept. In this regard, LPWAN technologies such as LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT play an important role in advancing. These technologies are suitable wireless communication protocols for battery-powered IoT objects that enable long-distance communication in low-power devices at a low operation cost. Some review papers have investigated the LPWAN technology in the IoT from different perspectives. However, the lack of detailed and systematic study outlining the role of these technologies in different IoT applications is very clear. Consequently, this gap inspired us to write the current study. The current works are classified into three main classes, including smart city, home automation, and smart healthcare. Besides, the involved models in the smart city group are categorized into five subgroups, including smart monitoring, smart metering, air pollution, smart agriculture, and smart parking. The selected works are reviewed, and their main features, including main idea, coverage range, sensor types, processing board, frequency band, communication protocols, power consumption analysis, and achievement, are specified. Generally, our main aim is to describe the challenging problems of applying LPWAN to various IoT applications, specify the efficient models, and recommend some hints for upcoming studies.