LoRaWAN Performance Evaluation with Optimized Configuration

Abstract

LoRaWAN is an access technology coupled with protocol stack specification which is exclusively presented to serve IoT application. IoT application commonly has small data and infrequent transmission. However, the challenge in presenting wireless access technology for IoT lies in its characteristic of massive node deployment and power-constrained transmission. Among several technologies, LoRaWAN promises the ability to handle massive number of nodes, longer transmission range, lower power consumption, as well as cheaper communication module. This paper presents a performance evaluation of LoRa network in respect to those claims. The performance of the network in term of packet delivery ratio, average energy consumption per transmission and average energy wasted in collision per nodes are investigated. A realistic scenario is considered, and the scalability study is also conducted via computer simulation. The result shows that the performance of LoRa network is highly dependent to the configuration of spreading factor, coding rate, and frequency selection. The performed experiment shows that the limitation inherited from pure ALOHA access strategy can be alleviated by randomizing frequency selection and node-specific optimization to maximize data rate relative to its location (i.e. channel condition) and contention severity.