A Network Performance Analysis of LoRa Modulation for LPWAN Sensor Devices

LoRa propagation at 433 MHz in tropical climate environment

“…In Malaysia, Lora was tested using 433MHz where this frequency is under the unlicensed spectrum in the country. Several studies have been conducted on LoRa performance at 868 MHz modulation [4][5].A comparison of LoRa in 868 MHz and 433 MHz was done by [6] in Europe.In urban environment, the IoT is aiming to develop smart cities with capabilities to provide a number of benefits in the management and optimization of traditional public services such as transport, parking system, lighting, tank level monitors, surveillance and so forth [7][8]. Other than urban application, LoRa-based network has also been deployed in maritime setting [4].However, not much work has been done up to this date on LoRa propagation performance in the tropical climate environments.…”

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

“…As stated previously, the LoRa modulation has been widely studied and its achievable range proven, yet its operation at 433 MHz has not been analyzed in detail. This analysis, and a comparison with the 868 MHz band, was done in a previous study [32], where several RF configurations were tested with a beta version of the sensor node communications block. From this experimentation, several LoRa RF configurations were selected for further technical testing.…”

“…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.…”

“…An alternative to this would be to set the UAV for search and rescue mode and later extracting the data, either by collecting the buoys from their location, or to try and set a temporary base station near the buoys location with a master node (connected to a laptop) and manually download the data from the sensor nodes. It is worth noting that in a prior work [32], it was proven that by increasing the spreading factor to 256 chips/symbol transmissions could be done to a receiver station at approximately 7 km. Assuming that this same distance is achievable in a marine-coastal environment, with such a spreading factor, a bandwidth of 125 kHz and coding rate of 4/5, the bitrate would only be reduced to 3.1 kbps but effectively almost doubling the transmission radius.…”

“…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].…”