LoRa indoor coverage and performance in an industrial environment: Case study

Abstract

Abstract-LoRa is a long range, low power, low bit rate, single hop wireless communication technology. It is intended to be used for Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where devices are battery powered and limited bandwidth is needed. In combination with its scalability and the low end device price, LoRa is a candidate technology for low bandwidth industrial applications with a high number of communication devices spread across large areas. The use case for this paper is taken from the flower industry, where a large number of trolleys need to communicate with a server during their movement across the auction floor area. Once trolleys are outside of the auction floor they can use the public LoRaWAN network to communicate with the server, without switching communication technology. The LoRaWAN network consists of multiple end nodes and a single gateway per cell, acting as a transparent bridge between the end nodes and the network server. The measurements show that with a single LoRa gateway we can cover an indoor area of around 34000m2 only with spreading factor 7, while for spreading factor 12 the total covered area will be even higher. Also, the area outside the factory is covered when switching to spreading factor 12. We also show that the number of nodes (trolleys) that can be served by a gateway in such a case can be as high as 6000.

An IoT Architecture for Continuous Livestock Monitoring Using LoRa LPWAN

“…In the literature there are several studies related to object and environmental monitoring by means of LoRa, concerning agriculture and livestock farming [19,21,[23][24][25], health [26], forestry [12,27], smart cities [2,28], industrial [4,5,29] and maritime [9] applications.…”

“…With the diffusion of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm [1], objects are being connected to the Internet, thus realizing a global network of connected things. This new concept is being used in several scenarios, such as in smart cities [2,3], industrial manufacturing [4,5], healthcare [6,7] and transportation [8,9]. Another application scenario is in rural areas [10,11], and specifically on smart livestock farming [12], over which we focus our work.…”

“…suburban or rural environments [15], making this technology viable for both small and medium-scale applications. It has also been shown that a single LoRa gateway can manage a large number of EDs with little maintenance and easy deployment [5].LoRa is a proprietary wireless communication standard developed by Semtech, based on a chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation [16,17]. The physical layer (PHY) uses chirp waveforms with different chirp rate, to maintain orthogonality among different classes of users, and with different initial frequency, to convey the actual information message [15].…”

“…suburban or rural environments [15], making this technology viable for both small and medium-scale applications. It has also been shown that a single LoRa gateway can manage a large number of EDs with little maintenance and easy deployment [5].…”

A LoRaWAN Wireless Sensor Network for Data Center Temperature Monitoring

“…In this case, multi-hop communication is necessary for long distance transmission, or for reliability in noisy or crowded environments. The usage of LoRa in indoor environments introduces a return to the one-hop communication model, at the cost of a reduced available bandwidth, but with the capability to cover up 34000m 2 [14] in a single communication with a similar transmission power. Moreover, for low traffic intensity, it has been demonstrated in [15] that indoor LoRa communication is more energy efficient than a multi-hop network that needs more than one router to cover the same distance.…”