Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged as essential connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), addressing requirements for long range, energy efficient communication that traditional wireless technologies cannot meet. With LPWAN connections projected to grow at 26% compound annual growth rate until 2027, understanding real-world performance is crucial for technology selection. This review examines four leading LPWAN technologies—LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and LTE-M. This review analyzes 20 peer reviewed studies from 2015–2025 reporting real-world deployment metrics across power consumption, range, data rate, scalability, availability, and security. Across these studies, practical performance diverges from vendor specifications. In the cited rural and urban LoRaWAN deployments LoRaWAN achieves 2+ year battery life and 11 km rural range but suffers collision limitations above 1000 devices per gateway. Sigfox demonstrates exceptional range (280 km record) with minimal power consumption but remains constrained by 12 byte payloads and security vulnerabilities. NB-IoT provides robust performance with 96–100% packet delivery ratios at −127 dBm on the tested commercial networks, and supports tens of thousands devices per cell, though mobility increases energy consumption. In the cited trials LTE-M offers highest throughput and sub 200 ms latency but fails beyond −113 dBm where NB-IoT maintains connectivity. NB-IoT emerges optimal for large scale stationary deployments, while LTE-M suits high throughput mobile applications.

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged as essential connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), addressing requirements for long range, energy efficient communication that traditional wireless technologies cannot meet. With LPWAN connections projected to grow at 26% compound annual growth rate until 2027, understanding real-world performance is crucial for technology selection. This review examines four leading LPWAN technologies - LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, and LTE-M. This review analyzes 20 peer reviewed studies from 2015-2025 reporting real-world deployment metrics across power consumption, range, data rate, scalability, availability, and security. Field studies reveal significant discrepancies between theoretical specifications and practical performance. LoRaWAN achieves 2+ year battery life and 11 km rural range but suffers collision limitations above 1000 devices per gateway. Sigfox demonstrates exceptional range (280 km record) with minimal power consumption but remains constrained by 12 byte payloads and security vulnerabilities. NB-IoT provides robust performance with 96-100% packet delivery ratios at -127 dBm and supports tens of thousands devices per cell, though mobility increases energy consumption. LTE-M offers highest throughput and sub 200 ms latency but fails beyond -113 dBm where NB-IoT maintains connectivity. NB-IoT emerges optimal for large scale stationary deployments, while LTE-M suits high throughput mobile applications.

Wearable devices, such as headsets and activity trackers, rely heavily on the Bluetooth and/or the Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communication standard to exchange data with smartphones or other peripherals. Since these devices collect personal health and activity data, ensuring the privacy and security of the transmitted data is crucial. Therefore, we present a dataset that captures complete Bluetooth communications—including advertising, connection, data exchange, and disconnection—in an RF isolated environment using software-defined radio. We were able to successfully decode the captured Bluetooth packets using existing tools. This dataset provides researchers with the ability to fully analyze Bluetooth traffic and gain insight into communication patterns and potential security vulnerabilities.

5G Standalone (SA) networks are the next generation of cellular networks, with broad applications envisioned in domains including IoT. In this article, we evaluate the feasibility of using Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to tightly synchronize User Equipment (UE) devices connected to a private 5G SA network. Our goal is to achieve submillisecond time synchronization accuracy in order to make the system applicable for industrial-automation IoT networks with stringent timing requirements. We measure the network delay and clock synchronization accuracy through clock comparison utilizing the pulse-per-second output from a UE network card and conclude that the desired accuracy remains challenging, with typical experiments demonstrating multi-millisecond clock offsets with significant and unpredictable drift.

This paper presents an experimental study on radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting of Bluetooth Classic devices. Our research aims to provide a practical evaluation of the possibilities for RF fingerprinting of everyday Bluetooth connected devices that may cause privacy risks. We have built an experimental setup for recording Bluetooth connection in a radio frequency isolated environment using commercially available SDR (software defined radio) systems, extracted fingerprints of the Bluetooth radio data in the form of carrier frequency offset and scaling factor from 6 different devices, and performed k-nearest neighbors (kNN) classification achieving 84\% accuracy. The experiment demonstrates that no matter what privacy measures are being taken in the protocol layer, the physical layer leaks significant information about the device to unauthorized listeners. In the context of the ever-growing Bluetooth device market, this research serves as a clarion call for device manufacturers, regulators, and end-users to acknowledge the privacy risks posed by RF fingerprinting and lays a foundation for more sizeable Bluetooth fingerprinting analysis research.