Welcome to the LoRaWAN Academy™
Prerequisites
There are no firm perquisites for this course, aside from curiosity and an interest in learning about LoRa® and the LoRaWAN® networking standard. That said, you will get more out of the course if you complete the related hands-on labs. The labs are independent activities, and each lab requires different hardware, as described in the labs themselves.
What to Expect
The LoRaWAN Academy™ is a self-paced course designed for people interested in learning about the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly, about LoRa radio modulation and LoRaWAN, the low power, wide area networking standard. The course consists of 12 modules that will help you build your understanding of LoRa and LoRaWAN from the ground up. Each module has clear Learning Objectives and provides a variety of learning experiences, including text, video lectures, and quizzes at the end of each module. You will also have the opportunity to put what you learn into practice by completing the Advanced Assignments and the related Hands-on Labs.
Note: Although you can navigate the course in any order that you like, to take the Final Exam, you will need to pass the quizzes in each module in the order in which they appear. By the end of the course, you should be able to pass the final exam, at which point you will receive your LoraWAN Academy™ Certificate of Completion.
Testing-Out of the Course
If you are already well-versed in LoRa and LoRaWAN, you can receive your Certificate of Completion for the course by earning a 90% on the Challenge Exam.
Why Offer this Course for Free?
We believe that there should be no barriers to entry for anyone interested in building long-range IoT solutions using LoRa-enabled devices on a LoRaWAN network. As noted by Donna Moore from the LoRa Alliance®, LoRaWAN has become the de facto standard for long-range low power wide area networks (LPWANs). Our goal with this course is to enable developers and others to understand the technology and to use this course and the related resources on the LoRa Developer Portal as a jumping-off point to begin their LoRaWAN journeys.
Building Community
We encourage you to take advantage of the LoRaWAN Academy channel in our Community Forum, where you can connect with other learners to discuss what you are learning and help each other out. The Forum is also a good place for getting answers to technical questions.
Module 7: Best Practices
While you can design and build devices that follow all aspects of the LoRaWAN® specification and that will pass all the LoRaWAN Certification tests, unless you follow some key best practices, these devices may still not have optimum performance when in operation. For a LoRaWAN network, the most valuable element is the downlink message. For example, a gateway can receive millions of messages per day from end devices on the network. However, due to regional dwell time and/or duty cycle restrictions, there are only so many messages it can physically send in a day. This module addresses some best practices that you can build into the design of both your end nodes and your LoRaWAN network to optimize performance.
Note
- Dwell time: The amount of airtime a message in a single transmission takes to travel from the sender to the receiver.
- Duty cycle: The total time a device is allowed to transmit during a given period.