Factors that Impact LoRa IoT Communication Technology

Abstract

Long Range (LoRa) is a low power wide area (LPWA) communication technology that has been developed for internet of things (IoT) applications. LoRa is seen as one of the popular LPWA communication technologies but there are several factors that could impact its performance when deployed. Hence, this paper highlights the factors that affect LoRa performance. In addition, an outdoor experimental study was carried out to investigate the performance of LoRa by considering different spread factors in varying topography and environmental scenario. The RSSI and packet receive ratio (PRR) were used to determine the coverage area and performance analysis, respectively. The result shows that the LoRa propagation signal is affected by topography of the area as the coverage could be limited and PRR reduced by 50%.