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I am working on a project which aims to record information acquired from a vehicle OBD (On Board Diagnostic) interface, to transmit them over the air to a server. The recorded information will be information such as speed, fuel consumption, throttle position, engine RPM, etc...

I am hesitating between the following RF technologies : LTE-M or LoRaWAN.

Both have drawbacks, but LoRaWAN since to be much more cost effective. But I am concerned about the throughput of the LoRaWAN technology.

I think the worst case scenario would be the sending of a 50 bytes payload every 100 ms. A more standard scenario would be the sending of a 30 bytes payload every second.

Does it seem feasible with LoRaWAN ? I feel that my project would not satisfy with the 1% duty cycle requirement

Tarick Welling
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The_Average_Engineer
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    TTN’s public community follows a Fair Access Policy that limits the uplink airtime to 30 seconds per day (24 hours) per node and the downlink messages to 10 messages per day (24 hours) per node. If you use a private network, these limits do not apply, but you still have to be compliant with the governmental and LoRaWAN limits. So, in my opinion, LoRa is not suitable for your mentioned scenario. – a4arshad Feb 02 '20 at 07:23

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No, LoRaWAN is not meant for throughput. It is meant for battery powered devices in 'remote' areas which need to run for a while (like years a while).

50 bytes every 100 ms is not an low amount of data transmissions. Even every second is not either.

LoRaWAN is meant for max 52 bytes (in the worst case scenario it can go up a bit more than that in favorable conditions) every hour or so.

You can however run your own network (thus not TTN or an commercial operator) and buy your own spectrum. (915 in US, 868 in EU, etc) This will allow you to go over the 1% duty cycle but it isn't really viable.

So seems to me that LTE-M is the better options. Other options could be Sigfox or NB-IoT.

Tarick Welling
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