A benchmark survey of long range (LoRaTM) spread-spectrum-communication at 2.45 GHz for safety applications

Abstract

The demand of wireless solutions in industrial applications increases since the early nineties. This trend is not only ongoing, it is further pushed by developments in the area of software stacks like the latest Bluetooth Low Energy Stack. It is also pushed by new chip-designs and powerful and highly integrated electronic hardware. The acceptance of wireless technologies as a possible solution for industrial applications, has overcome the entry barrier [1]. The first step to see wireless as standard for many industrial applications is almost accomplished. Nevertheless there is nearly none acceptance of wireless technology for Safety applications. One highly challenging and demanding requirement is still unsolved: The aspect safety and robustness. Those topics have been addressed in many cases but always in a similar manner. WirelessHART as an example addresses this topic with redundant so called multiple propagation paths and frequency hopping to handle with interferences and loss of network participants. So far the pure peer to peer link is rarely investigated and there are less safety solutions available. One product called LoRa™ can be seen as one possible solution to address this lack of safety within wireless links. This paper focuses on the safety performance evaluation of a modem-chip-design. The use of diverse and redundant wireless technologies like LoRa can lead to an increase acceptance of wireless in safety applications. Many measurements in real industrial application have been carried out to be able to benchmark the new chip in terms of the safety aspects. The content of this research results can help to raise the level of confidence in wireless. In this paper, the term "safety" is used for data transmission reliability.

Performance of a low-power wide-area network based on LoRa technology: Doppler robustness, scalability, and coverage

“…Using the data about the density of the end devices for the discussed scenarios, which was reported in IEEE 802. 16 Broadband Wireless Access Working Group, 25 and assuming that the whole radio channel is used exclusively by the target application, in Table 4, we analyze how dense the gateways have to be placed. The reported results reveal that if for the frequently reporting devices (e.g.…”

Measurements, performance and analysis of LoRa FABIAN, a real-world implementation of LPWAN

“…This work is followed by [3] where a description of an experimental deployment of a LoRa network is provided and a rough estimation of the number of gateways needed to cover a city is done. The performance of LoRa when transmitting through materials such as water and concrete is done in [4]. First short and longrange measurements was conducted by [5], however in a notably open/semi-rural environment.…”

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Wireless Sensor Network for Marine-Coastal Environment Monitoring

“…Even though the range limits of the LoRa modulation were not tested in this article, as these have already been validated in other studies [30,31,32,33,54,55], for scenarios where a greater transmission radius is desired, there are several things that must be taken into consideration for a proper deployment. Since any UAV is restricted to a finite amount of flight time, it is important to consider the bitrate of the LoRa transmissions, the frequency at which the environmental data is captured and the mode of operation of the UAV.…”

“…There are several possibilities for these type of transmissions, yet the recent development of the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocols present new opportunities with the benefits of a reduced energy consumption and moderate data rate [29,30]. One of the most promising technologies in LPWANs is the LoRa spread spectrum modulation, which has been proven to be able to communicate data across several kilometers with a low power consumption [30,31,32,33]. The unique modulation of this technology not only offers the possibility of transmitting below the noise floor, but has also a high resilience to external interference [34].…”