Abstract
LoRaWAN has gained significant attention for Internet-of-Things (IOT) applications due to its low power consumption and long range potential for data transmission. While there is a significant body of work assessing LoRA coverage and data transmission characteristics, there is a lack of data available about commercially available LoRa prototyping boards and their power consumption, in relation to their features. It is currently difficult to estimate the power consumption of a LoRa module operating under different transmission profiles, due to a lack of manufacturer data available. In this study, power testing has been carried out on physical hardware and significant variation was found in the power consumption of competing boards, all marketed as “extremely low power”. In this paper, testing results are presented alongside an experimentally-derived power model for the lowest power LoRa module, and power requirements are compared to firmware settings. The power analysis adds to existing work showing trends in data-rate and transmission power settings effects on electrical power consumption. The model’s accuracy is experimentally verified and shows acceptable agreement to estimated values. Finally, applications for the model are presented by way of a hypothetical scenario and calculations performed in order to estimate battery life and energy consumption for varying data transmission intervals.
Highlights
LoRa has several unique characteristics in the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) space, but its principal advantages are long range communication with extremely low power draw [1]
In order to accomplish LoRaWAN networks over large distances, a star of stars network topology is typically utilised with several gateways [6]
We became aware that at low data rates the message size had a significant impact on power consumption, but this effect was greatly diminished at data rates higher than setting 2
Summary
LoRa has several unique characteristics in the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) space, but its principal advantages are long range communication with extremely low power draw [1]. In order to prototype applications for this technology it is commonplace to begin by purchasing a development kit containing a Micro Controller Unit (MCU) and a LoRa radio There are many such prototype boards available and those which we interrogated are marketed using the power usage based on deep sleep consumption. Given the lack of manufacturer data available on transmission power requirements it is impossible to to make an estimate of the power required for a specific use case This initial estimate is crucial to investigate as it can provide a fast way to validate the likelihood of success for an application of the technology, i.e., if a specific size, power input requirement, and message interval is specified an engineer is unable to estimate if a LoRa module can successfully provide a solution. With the work presented in this paper a formulaic power estimate is provided allowing a designer to consider the likely transmission characteristics required and subsequently estimate the battery size required and transmission interval possible
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