Abstract
Many wireless Internet-of-Things applications require extended battery life ranging from a few months to a few years. Such applications have motivated the recent developments in low power wide area networks, including the rise of Long Range (LoRa) technology. LoRa has a simple modulation scheme designed for extended converge, low battery consumption, and resistance to high interference levels. Thus LoRa is primarily targeted for shared spectrum applications where interference levels are typically higher than controlled spectrum applications where a single operator usually has a dominant control on the quality of service. As a result, it is of paramount importance to carefully design IoT networks while taking into account the impending impacts of interference and propagation environments. This paper presents a novel LoRa network design framework that utilizes a developed open-source emulator to provide a reliable network coverage estimation. The framework is tested in one of the largest open-access IoT network designs in Australia, which enabled the deployment of 294 sensors and 48 gateways. Both the framework and the emulator are implemented using MATLAB scripting, enabling integration with built-in and external radio planning tools. The framework leverages real interference measurements captured using software defined radio that records the spectrotemporal behavior of the existing traffic in the shared band.
Highlights
Recent estimations predict that more than 50 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices will join the global network by 2022 [1]
A prominent low power wide area networks (LPWAN) technology that relies on chirp spread spectrum (CSS) is the Long Range (LoRa) modulation adopted by LoRa Alliance [4]
CHANNEL AND INTERFERENCE EMULATOR As part of the developed LoRa emulator, we provide an integrated channel and interference emulator such that the generated LoRa frames are subjected to realistic radio channel impairments
Summary
Recent estimations predict that more than 50 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices will join the global network by 2022 [1]. Homssi et al.: IoT Network Design Using Open-Source LoRa Coverage Emulator usually operated in the Industrial Scientific and Medical band (ISM-band), which is part of the unlicensed spectrum. In order to provide a fairer sharing opportunity, many restrictions are imposed on the devices operating in the ISM-band by spectrum regulators, such as restrictions on EIRP envelopes, caps on the limited number of frequency hops, and hopping rate, and limitations on the certain duty cycle of the transmissions [6]. The design framework utilizes this emulator to appraise the performance of a LoRa physical link and to provide the expected network-level coverage and data rate. It provides an LPWAN network design framework that accounts for the unique features in the shared spectrum bands for IoT applications. The framework allows the integration with built-in raytracing, enabling a high-fidelity replica of the propagation environment
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