Analyzing LoRa: A use case perspective

Abstract

Low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technologies are capable of supporting a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. While several LPWAN technologies exist, Long Range (LoRa) and its network architecture LoRaWAN, is currently the most adopted technology. LoRa provides a range of physical layer communication settings, such as bandwidth, spreading factor, coding rate, and transmission frequency. These settings impact throughput, reliability, and communication range. As IoT use cases result in varying communication patterns, it is essential to analyze how LoRa's different communication settings impact on real IoT use cases. In this paper, we analyze the impact of LoRa's communication settings on four IoT use cases, e.g. smart metering, smart parking, smart street lighting, and vehicle fleet tracking. Our results demonstrate that the setting corresponding to the fastest data rate achieves up to 380% higher packet delivery ratio and uses 0.004 times the energy compared to other evaluated settings, while being suitable to support the IoT use cases presented here. However, the setting covers a smaller communication area compared to the slow data rate settings. Moreover, we modified the Aloha-based channel access mechanism used by LoRaWAN and our results demonstrate that the modified channel access positively impacts the performance of the different communication settings.