Evaluation of Antenna Dependent Wireless Communication Based on LoRa For Clear Line of Sight (CLOS) And Non-Clear Line of Sight (NC-CLOS) Applications

Abstract

The emerging field of the internet of things (IoT) requires a low-power-low-range solution in remote and inaccessible places where connectivity in any form is not possible. There are many IoT devices like Zigbee, LoRa WAN, Sigfox, which operate within 5m to 5kms, with a change in bandwidth and power consumption. The difficulties in installing these types of IoT devices are critical because of connectivity issues and external hindrances like a non-clear line of sight (NC-LOS), frequency, bandwidth, time on Air (ToA), and power availability. The long-range (LoRa) is a portable, low-power wireless communication device that works on the principle of chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation. Its performance concerning frequency, power consumption, ToA, clear line of sight (CLOS), and NC-LOS depends on the type of antenna used for unknown distances. Therefore, in this paper, the 868MHz frequency is used to communicate between LoRa - end-transmitter node to LoRa-end receiver node with a fixed bandwidth of 125 kHz in the premises of Symbiosis. The constant data size, also known as the data-packet of 11-bytes, is sent wirelessly through transmitter-node receiver-node at different locations and altitudes. The contribution of this paper is to investigate the distance required to transmit the data-packet and give a choice of the antenna in CLOS & NC-LOS. A practical demonstration of different low-cost available antennas with variation in the distance with different LoRa devices like SX1276/SX1278 is proposed. It shows that the low-cost helical type antenna is more-favorable horizontally and vertically up to a certain range in CLOS and NC-LOS conditions.