Low Power Wide Area Network Analysis: Can LoRa Scale?

By Orestis Georgiou, Usman Raza. 2016

667 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low power wide area (LPWA) networks are making spectacular progress from design, standardization, to commercialization. At this time of fast-paced adoption, it is of utmost importance to analyze how well these technologies will scale as the number of devices connected to the Internet of Things inevitably grows. In this letter, we provide a stochastic geometry framework for modeling the performance of a single gateway LoRa network, a leading LPWA technology. Our analysis formulates the unique peculiarities of LoRa, including its chirp spread-spectrum modulation technique, regulatory limitations on radio duty cycle, and use of ALOHA protocol on top, all of which are not as common in today’s commercial cellular networks. We show that the coverage probability drops exponentially as the number of end-devices grows due to interfering signals using the same spreading sequence. We conclude that this fundamental limiting factor is perhaps more significant toward LoRa scalability than for instance spectrum restrictions. Our derivations for co-spreading factor interference found in LoRa networks enables rigorous scalability analysis of such networks.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A survey of data fusion in smart city applications (2019, background): “…low-latency, and cost-effective communication technologies and networks, such as, 5G [27]–[29], wireless sensor networks (WSN) [30]–[32], Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) [33], [34], and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) [35], [36] and their integration in smart city projects is also relentless.”
Low Power Wide Area Networks: An Overview (2016, methodology): “. [37] estimate limit on number of nodes that can be supported by a typical LORAWAN deployment to be 120 per 3.8 ha, a device density far less than expected in urban environments. Georgiou & Raza [36] further unveil that LORAWAN’s coverage probability decay exponentially with number of end devic”
A Survey on Scalable LoRaWAN for Massive IoT: Recent Advances, Potentials, and Challenges (2022, methodology): “interval-based method [123], equal-area-based scheme [120] and the Random scheme where the SFs are assigned randomly without considering the LoRa ED location.”
A Survey on LoRa Networking: Research Problems, Current Solutions, and Open Issues (2019, background): “Georgiou and Raza [57] develop a mathematical model for a LoRaWAN network with a single gateway by also considering other unique LoRaWAN features like modulation and radio dutycycling.”
A Survey of LoRaWAN for IoT: From Technology to Application (2018, methodology): “Compared to [70], studies in [71,73] consider also impact of channel fading modeled as Rayleigh fading.”