What is Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN)

The quality of the healthcare system is a significant contributor to a nation's economy. Technological developments in the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, and wireless body area networks (WBAN) and their interaction have given a boost to healthcare as an application domain which seems to be very promising to improve the quality of health care. Long-range and ubiquitous deployment needs of healthcare can be very well handled by narrow band IoT (NB-IoT). NB-IoT has the potential to reduce power and bandwidth requirements. NB-IoT is a low power wide area (LPWA) version of IoT which has the potential to cater to remote healthcare needs. NB-IoT is preferred over other networks due to cost efficiency, longevity, security, and mature, wide-reaching networks. However, security is an unavoidable threat in any IoT network, so as in NB-IoT. In this chapter, the authors discuss the performance of NB-IoT for healthcare applications, the issues and challenges faced, and some of the solutions to countermeasure these problems.