Do LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale?

By Martin C. Bor, Utz Roedig, Thiemo Voigt, Juan M. Alonso. International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, 2016

797 citations recorded by the source corpus.

New Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as Long Range (LoRa) are emerging which enable power efficient wireless communication over very long distances. Devices typically communicate directly to a sink node which removes the need of constructing and maintaining a complex multi-hop network. Given the fact that a wide area is covered and that all devices communicate directly to a few sink nodes a large number of nodes have to share the communication medium. LoRa provides for this reason a range of communication options (centre frequency, spreading factor, bandwidth, coding rates) from which a transmitter can choose. Many combination settings are orthogonal and provide simultaneous collision free communications. Nevertheless, there is a limit regarding the number of transmitters a LoRa system can support. In this paper we investigate the capacity limits of LoRa networks. Using experiments we develop models describing LoRa communication behaviour. We use these models to parameterise a LoRa simulation to study scalability. Our experiments show that a typical smart city deployment can support 120 nodes per 3.8 ha, which is not sufficient for future IoT deployments. LoRa networks can scale quite well, however, if they use dynamic communication parameter selection and/or multiple sinks.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8dacf579e390dadd4ff8cadfb1ea80fafa670e1

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on LoRa Networking: Research Problems, Current Solutions, and Open Issues (2019, methodology): “[21] consider bandwidth and transmission power for scalability analysis through simulation.”
Scalability Analysis of Large-Scale LoRaWAN Networks in ns-3 (2017, methodology): “[18] studies the limit on the number of transmitters supported by a LoRa system based on an empirical model.”
A Survey of LoRaWAN for IoT: From Technology to Application (2018, methodology): “Similar approach was followed in [47], where LoRa capture effect was determined by empirical measurements.”
Edge-computing-driven Internet of Things: A Survey (2022, methodology): “developed a platform for LoRa performance evaluation and described a protocol that leverages LoRa’s unique features on top of LoRa’s physical layer [25].”
Adaptive configuration of lora networks for dense IoT deployments (2018, methodology): “We validated the communication model of our simulator against the experimental results from [6, 16] and verified that it yields results very close to those presented in the two articles.”
Low Power Wide Area Networks: An Overview (2016, background): “[37] estimate limit on number of nodes that can be supported by a typical LORAWAN deployment to be 120 per 3.”