LoRa Performance in Rural and Suburban Areas

The increasing popularity of Internet of Things use cases in domains relying on connectivity over large areas managing a massive amount of devices, is feeding the demand for Low Power Wide Area Networks. In this context, LoRa is a popular technology choice as it offers good performance at low cost. This work analyzes the quality of reception in a LoRa Network located at a university campus considering two distinct transmission media: rural environments where links present channels with dominant line-of-sight components, and suburban zones where buildings and obstacles give place to channels with larger attenuation and multi-path fading. Performance is evaluated varying several transmission parameters such as distance, spreading factor, and transmitted power. The hardware used to obtain measurements is the LoRa Suite Development Kit from Mircochip, composed of a gateway and several end-nodes connected through a virtual server in the docker container platform.