A Computable Form for LoRa Performance Estimation: Application to Ricean and Nakagami Fading

Abstract

Emerging applications such as connected farms, wildness monitoring, smart cities, and Factory of the Future leverage emerging Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), allowing a good trade-off between radio range, data rate, and energy consumption. However, only few theoretical studies of these recent technologies are available to help network designers to optimize real field deployments or even achieve real-time adaptation of transmission parameters. A new approach based on Marcum function is proposed in this paper to estimate -in a fast and accurate manner -the performance in terms of Bit Error Rate of LoRa, one of the most used LPWAN technologies. The method is proposed for Gaussian channels, over challenging propagation environments, i.e., Ricean and Nakagami fadings. Simulation results show that our proposed approximation reduces the approximation error about one order of magnitude compared to existing ones and can be computed by classical software.

New Results for the Error Rate Performance of LoRa Systems over Fading Channels

“…As it is evident, the results obtained using the mixture gamma approximation match very well with the exact ones, obtained using ( 9) and ( 45), for all considered values of SF. Finally, it is worth pointing out that our newly derived formulae for Rice and Nakagamim fading were tested against the ones proposed in [23] and a close match was reported. Nevertheless, as also mentioned in the introduction section, the proposed analytical framework still provides accurate results with much lower complexity than those reported in [23].…”

“…Finally, it is worth pointing out that our newly derived formulae for Rice and Nakagamim fading were tested against the ones proposed in [23] and a close match was reported. Nevertheless, as also mentioned in the introduction section, the proposed analytical framework still provides accurate results with much lower complexity than those reported in [23].…”

“…The exact BER values were obtained using the two-fold integral in (9), the single integral expression in Proposition 1 and Monte-Carlo simulation based on (5), using 10 5 random samples. For m = 1, i.e., Rayleigh fading, approximate results were obtained using (23). As it can be observed, the approximate formulas obtained using Proposition 2 match well the exact results in the entire SNR region.…”

“…The conditional symbol error probability given the squared channel coefficient h is given as [21][22][23]…”

Low-Power Wide-Area Networks: A Broad Overview of Its Different Aspects

“…The whole transmission Time on Air (ToA) is controlled by a completion acknowledgment, which reduces unnecessary redundancy and improves QoS. The Marcum function is presented to estimate the performance of LoRa in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) in a timely and precise manner to improve the QoS [49]. The authors in [50], present a unique multi-hop data routing mechanism for IoT applications over LPWAN.…”