Internet of Things for Architects

Narrowband versus wideband communication

Many of the wireless protocols that we will cover are known as wideband. We will see that the converse (narrowband) also has a place, especially for LPWAN. The differences between narrowband and wideband are as follows:

• Narrowband: A radio channel whose operational bandwidth does not exceed the channel's coherence bandwidth. Generally, when we talk about narrowband, we speak to signals that are 100 kHz or smaller in bandwidth. In narrowband, multipath causes amplitude and phase changes. A narrowband signal will fade uniformly, so adding more frequencies does not benefit the signal. Narrowband channels are also called flat fading channels because they usually will pass all spectral components with ...