Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN Technology for Indoor Remote Health and Wellbeing Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract. Long lifetime of a wireless sensor/actuator node, low transceiver chip cost and large coverage area are the main characteristics of the low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies. These targets correlate well with the requirements imposed by the health and wellbeing applications of the digital age. Therefore, LPWANs can found their niche among traditional short range technologies for wireless body area networks, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth and ultra wideband. To check this hypothesis, in this work we investigate the indoor performance with one of the LPWAN technologies, named LoRa, by the means of empirical measurements. The measurements were conducted using the commercially available devices in the main campus of the University of Oulu, Finland. In order to obtain the comprehensive picture, the experiments were executed for the sensor nodes operating with various physical layer settings, i.e., using the different spreading factors, bandwidths and transmit powers. The obtained results indicate that with the largest spreading factor of 12 and 14 dBm transmit power, the whole campus area (570 meters North to South and over 320 meters East to West) can be covered by a single base station. The average measured packet success delivery ratio for this case was 96.7%, even with no acknowledgements and retransmissions used. The campus was covered also with lower spreading factors with 2 dBm transmit power, but considerably more packets were lost. For example with spreading factor 8, 13.1% of the transmitted packets were lost. Aside of this, we have investigated the power consumption of the LoRa compliant transceiver with different physical layer settings. The experiments conducted using the specially designed module show that based on the settings used, the amount of energy for sending the same amount of data may differ up to 200-fold. This calls for efficient selection of the communication mode to be used by the energy restricted devices and emphasizes the importance of enabling adaptive data rate control.

Measurement, Characterization, and Modeling of LoRa Technology in Multifloor Buildings

“…We find that the greater the bandwidth is, the lower PRR it achieves. This result corresponds well with the results in [24]. This is because the symbol rate R s = BW 2 SF ; therefore, when the transmission power is constant, the wider the bandwidth is, the less energy will be distributed for each symbol.…”

Improving Intelligence and Efficiency of Salt Lake Production by Applying a Decision Support System Based on IOT for Brine Pump Management

“…As shown in Figure 12, the test results showed that the received signal strength decreased with the increase of communication distance, and the packet loss rate was increasing, which was consistent with other scholars' test and evaluation of LoRa wireless communication technology performance [34,41], although a different application environment will have different effects on link quality and packet loss rate. From the test results, the wireless sensor network based on LoRa technology can realize the reliability of communication in the harsh climate of the brine mining field and meet the practical application requirements.…”

“…By inviting corporate managers and operators to participate in the system evaluation, we discussed the system performance and formed a consensus on how to develop the system to improve the efficiency of salt lake brine production management [42]. Test scenario 3: Reliability test of communication link based on LoRa and GPRS The reliability of wireless links from sensor nodes to the server is evaluated by measuring the packet loss rate of the LoRa network within 30 days at the brine mines [41]. First, the sensor node transmits a 20-byte packet with a fixed transmission power of 15 dBm at a transmission interval of 60 s. Then, the GPRS gateway forwards data received from the sensor node to the server.…”

On the integration of LoRaWAN with the 5G test network

“…A single gateway can serve tens of thousands of low power wireless end devices [5]. Thus indoors one cell can cover a large real-estate [6] and outdoors coverage area can be tens of kilometers [5].…”