Abstract
LoRa (or LoRaWAN) is by far the best known representative of narrowband communication systems designed for the Internet of Things. As a system dedicated specifically for long-range operations, it possesses a considerable processing gain for the energetic link budget improvement and a remarkable immunity to multipath and interference. The paper describes outcomes of measurement campaigns during which the LoRa performance was tested against these two factors, that is, a heavy-multipath propagation and a controlled, variable interference generated, respectively, in a reverberation chamber and an anechoic chamber. Results allow quantitative appraisal of the system behavior under these harsh conditions with respect to LoRa’s three major configurable parameters: the spreading factor, bandwidth, and code rate. They also allow dividing LoRa configurational space into three distinct sensitivity regions: in the white region it is immune to both interference and multipath propagation, in the light-grey region it is only immune to the multipath phenomenon but sensitive to interference, and in the dark grey region LoRa is vulnerable to both phenomena.
Highlights
Introduction toLoRa “LoRaWAN,” being an abbreviation of Long-Range WAN [1], is an open communication system dedicated to operation at long distances under harsh attenuation and interference conditions, supported presently by LoRa Alliance
It was demonstrated there that in comparison to analogous data gathered in 2004 [9] the average spectral occupancy was increased considerably indicating the appearance of a plethora of new radiation sources that had appeared over that period
It stems from analyzing the horizontal distribution of Packet Error Rate (PER) profiles within each BW as they shift from left towards right as SNR is being increased in response to lowering the interfering power Pgen
Summary
The IoT system operation in unlicensed ISM bands on one hand entails the lack of license fees; on the other hand, the shared use of the spectrum causes inevitable rise of the background noise, as new radiating devices are being added The issue of this elevated noise was tackled, for instance, in [8], where wideband measurements (for the range 200–3000 MHz) were carried out in urban environments in Relative power (dBr). It was demonstrated there that in comparison to analogous data gathered in 2004 [9] the average spectral occupancy was increased considerably indicating the appearance of a plethora of new radiation sources (located more densely) that had appeared over that period They are characterized by a high unpredictability and a considerable variance both in time and in amplitude which do not allow qualifying them as white Gaussian noise. Other valuable contributions to the topic of interference in LoRa are [12,13,14,15,16]
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