Performance Evaluation of LoRa Considering Scenario Conditions

TLDR

IoT verticals such as smart cities, farming, and goods monitoring demand wide‑area connectivity that simultaneously delivers coverage, low power consumption, and scalability, requirements that existing wireless sensor and cellular technologies cannot meet, leading to the emergence of LP‑WAN solutions like LoRaWAN. This work aims to comprehensively evaluate LoRaWAN performance under varying environmental conditions. The evaluation combines measurements from urban, suburban, and rural real scenarios under dynamic and static conditions with a theoretical coverage study using a radio‑planning tool and precise propagation models. Results indicate that optimal LoRaWAN physical‑layer configurations vary by scenario and that pre‑deployment propagation assessment is crucial to balance network robustness and data‑rate.

Abstract

New verticals within the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm such as smart cities, smart farming, or goods monitoring, among many others, are demanding strong requirements to the Radio Access Network (RAN) in terms of coverage, end-node's power consumption, and scalability. The technologies employed so far to provide IoT scenarios with connectivity, e.g., wireless sensor network and cellular technologies, are not able to simultaneously cope with these three requirements. Thus, a novel solution known as Low Power - Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) has emerged as a promising alternative to provide with low-cost and low-power-consumption connectivity to end-nodes spread in a wide area. Concretely, the Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology is one of the LP-WAN platforms that is receiving greater attention from both the industry and the academia. For that reason, in this work, a comprehensive performance evaluation of LoRaWAN under different environmental conditions is presented. The results are obtained from three real scenarios, namely, urban, suburban, and rural, considering both dynamic and static conditions, hence a discussion about the most proper LoRaWAN physical-layer configuration for each scenario is provided. Besides, a theoretical coverage study is also conducted by the use of a radio planning tool considering topographic maps and a precise propagation model. From the attained results, it can be concluded that it is necessary to evaluate the propagation conditions of the deployment scenario prior to the system implantation in order to reach a compromise between the robustness of the network and the transmission data-rate.