Known and Unknown Facts of LoRa

Abstract

Long Range (LoRa) is a Low-power Wide-area Network technology designed for the Internet of Things. In recent years, it has gained significant momentum among industrial and research communities. Patented by Semtech, LoRa makes use of chirp spread spectrum modulation to deliver data with promises of long battery life, far-reaching communication distances, and a high node density at the cost of data rate. In this article, we conduct a series of experiments to verify the claims made by Semtech on LoRa technology. Our results show that LoRa is capable of communicating over 10km under line-of-sight environments. However, under non-line-of-sight environments, LoRa’s performance is severely affected by obstructions such as buildings and vegetations. Moreover, the promise of prolonged battery life requires extreme tuning of parameters. Last, a LoRa gateway supports up to 6,000 nodes with PRR requirement of >70%. This study also explores the relationship between LoRa transmission parameters and proposes an algorithm to determine optimal settings in terms of coverage and power consumption under non-line-of-sight environments. It further investigates the impact of LoRa Wide-area Networks on energy consumption and network capacity along with implementation of a LoRa medium access mechanism and possible gains brought forth by implementing such a mechanism.

Deployment of a Lorawan Network and Evaluation of Tracking Devices in the Context of Smart Cities

“…In essence, these results corroborate that the relief of the installation area and the environment are key factors of the LoRaWAN network deployment, as concluded in [19,14]. It was possible to reach a distance greater than 30 km in the rural area, according to points P 39 to P 46 , so that neighboring municipalities could be reached as well.…”

“…However, still in the urban area, point P 33 is more than 3 km away. Unlike the other furthest points in the urban area, P 33 presents clear LoS, that is, like [19] we highlight the importance of a clear LoS between the aplication and the gateway. Although the simulation performed with CloudRF does not contain obstacles, the results of the practical assessment corroborated the simulation results regarding the signal coverage.…”

“…The work of Liando et al [19] perform measurements to evaluate Lora, including the Doppler effect in mobile nodes. They employed a mobile LoRa gateway by the roadside and attached an end device to a car used as moving transmitter.…”

“…In this scenario, they conclude more 85% of sent messages were received taking in account all speeds. Other studies about LoRa, including mobility, were conducted in Romania [20] and Singapure [19].…”

“…In this paper we perform experimental investigations to evaluate commercial and assembled LoRaWAN tracker devices aiming to understand the behaviour of such devices in order to select the most suitable to be installed in the recycling garbage trucks in the future. Although the literature presents important investigations on how to correctly configure LoRa parameters, including when there are mobile nodes, in different environments [18,19,14,20], as far as we know there are no practical evaluations comparing comercial and non-comercial LoRaWAN tracking. Furthermore, each environment presents particular a set of characteristics that make it unique and challenging for radio propagation, as vegetation, climate, Line-of-Sign (Los), etc.…”