LoRa network performance comparison between open area and tree farm based on PHY factors

Abstract

IoT(Internet of Things) applied to agriculture can be a great help to increase efficiency of growing crops. For applying IoT to agriculture industry, using a kind of devices and data obtained by sensing are essential. Furthermore, in agriculture with IoT, networking is one of the most important parts. LoRa is one of the great representative among LPWAN to implement Agriculture IoT. It has a lot of advantages, especially in terms of low costs and excellent battery performance. In addition, it can be deployed with much less costs and have rich ecosystem due to alliance with partnership companies. Unfortunately, most of these researches are about experiments which is conducted in open area, urban area or several crop farms. Researches about tree farm were not done so far before. A lot of previous works tested the performance of the LoRa network in mountainous and urban areas. In mountainous areas, the packet transmission rate is affected by the altitude of the terrain. Urban areas are affected by the location of the building. Therefore, in this paper, we did some experiments to verify LoRa network performance according to changing PHY setting in tree farm and open area. We focused on investigating performance with changing PHY factors to measure the performances such as reliability and distance. Consequently, we can find some points. First, comparison between tree farm and open area is that the variation of tree farm is bigger than the variation of open area. So, we can recognize that PDR is more sensitive to PHY factors in the tree farm. Second, it appears that PDR is higher in the open area than the tree farm. However, in the open area, only the variation of PDR according to CR is theoretically increased. In addition, as SF increases, PDR also increases like odd numbered ID 001, 003, 005 and even numbered ID 002, 004, 006 in tree farm. At last, we can only find the difference according to changing BW 120 to 250 in the comparison of 001 and 007, 002 and 008 in 150M in the tree farm. And we can also find out the difference between 001 and 007 in 100M, 002 and 008 in 150M.