LoRa Alliance Certification Program Expands to SCHC End-Devices

The LoRa Alliance launched IPv6 over LoRaWAN earlier this year to broaden LoRaWAN’s IoT market to include internet-based standards required in smart electricity metering and new applications in smart buildings, industries, logistics and homes.

The IPv6 adaptation layer facilitates and accelerates development of secure and interoperable applications over LoRaWAN. With the IPv6 adaptation layer, IP-based solutions are transmittable over LoRaWAN and more easily integrate with cloud infrastructures. This allows developers to enable internet-based applications, while reducing time-to-market and total cost of ownership.

To enable the deployment of IPv6 over LoRaWAN solutions and give end users the benefits from IP-based solutions, LoRaWAN certification is available for end-devices using static context header compression. The certification confirms that the end-device meets the functional requirements of the LoRaWAN IPv6 Adaptation Layer Specification TS010-1.0.0.

The first applications to leverage SCHC for IPv6 over LoRaWAN are smart metering and IoT applications in the smart grid. Solutions using LoRaWAN for metering include proactive consumption monitoring, leak detection warnings and automatic shutoffs and solutions for balancing electricity supply and demand.

LoRaWAN is cost-effective to deploy and is ideal for identifying and managing unmeasured losses, which currently reach into the billions of dollars each year, in addition to helping to conserve energy. Similar benefits are potentially realized for water and gas metering. LoRaWAN certified devices communicate over open standards enabling scale to address these growing markets.

“With vendors now able to certify LoRaWAN end devices using SCHC, customers can confidently commit to massive utilities deployments,” said Donna Moore, CEO and chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance. “This will further drive digital industrialization across a wide variety of new markets and applications, which will in turn enable massive IoT.”

End devices must be LoRaWAN certified as a prerequisite of SCHC over LoRaWAN certification. The full testing suite for SCHC over LoRaWAN is available for download on the LoRaWAN Certification Test Tool.