LoRa Alliance rolls out QR codes for zero-touch onboarding

The humble QR code has been adopted by the LoRa Alliance to speed up and simplify IoT device provisioning.

The industry group, which promotes the LoRa LPWAN standard, said its new QR codes can be printed on IoT devices, and carry the required device and vendor information in a format that can be readily entered into a network management system, thereby enabling zero-touch onboarding.

“As massive IoT is ramping up and the number of IoT devices being deployed accelerates, we identified a clear need to streamline the device provisioning process to replace the existing manual one,” said Alper Yegin, vice chair of the LoRa Alliance board. “The Technical Committee has developed the QR code approach to support the continued growth of LoRaWAN and the market need for true zero touch deployments.”

Indeed, according to research firm Transforma Insights, there will be 4 billion LPWAN device connections by 2030, 1.4 billion of which will be based on non-cellular networking standards, like LoRaWAN and Sigfox.

Launching QR codes builds on the LoRa Alliance’s recent additions to the LoRaWAN specification, “which now provides every element needed for easy development, certification testing, and deployment of LoRaWAN,” said LoRa Alliance CEO and chairwoman Donna Moore.

It is also a way for the LoRa Alliance to ensure it remains at the centre of the LoRa ecosystem. Reason being, a company has to be a member in order to receive a unique vendor ID that can be linked to the LoRa Alliance’s new QR codes.

“One of the LoRa Alliance’s key goals is to simplify LoRaWAN deployments,” Moore said “Implementing QR code-based network management offers tremendous advantages by automating a previously manual process.”