Coverage and Capacity Analysis of LoRa WAN Deployment for Massive IoT in Urban and Suburban Scenario

Abstract

Choosing connectivity technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the most important aspect in the early stages of network planning. Long Range (LoRa) Wide Area Network (WAN) that categorized into Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network is a potential connectivity technology for typical massive IoT applications like a smart meter, smart manufacturing, environmental monitoring, etc. This paper aims to provide coverage and capacity analysis of LoRa WAN for typical massive IoT application. The urban and suburban areas were chosen to observe the differences between those two scenarios. The results shown the capacity calculation in terms of the gateways needed is mainly influenced by the value of the bandwidth (BW), spreading factor (SF) and Coding Rate (CR). Coverage simulation is done by calculating the link budget, followed by a simulation using Forsk Atoll 3.3.2. It can be concluded that the whole determined areas can be served within acceptable levels with values > -137 dBm as the minimum sensitivity of the highest SF. While the mean of best signal level is -84.58 dBm and -90.9 dBm for the urban and suburban scenario, respectively.