Factors that affect LoRa Propagation in Foliage Medium

Abstract

Long Range (LoRa) is a popular communication technology which has been used recently for many of the internet of things (IoT) applications. LoRa technology is being used for various smart city operations as well as in the field of smart agriculture. Some of the smart agricultural applications need LoRa propagation in vegetation medium. To model a wireless channel, several factors should be considered as those have significant impact on the performance of LoRa propagation through foliage medium. In this paper some of the possible factors are highlighted as those are responsible for the degradation of LoRa channel quality. Aslo an experimental study was undergone in the foliage medium (a line of five date palm trees) to investigate the LoRa physical layer performance utilizing different spread factors (SF7-SF12). The RSSI values were measured for the propagation through a line of trees and compared with the expected RSSI values. The result shows that the measured RSSI values are higher than the expected values for LoRa propagation in foliage medium. The result obtained in this paper may help LoRa propagation Channel modelling in foliage medium in future studies.