Performance Evaluation of LoRa Communications in Harsh Industrial Environments

Abstract

LoRa technology is being integrated into industrial applications as part of Industry 4.0 owing to its longer range and low power consumption. However, noise, interference, and the fading effect all have a negative impact on LoRa performance in an industrial environment, necessitating solutions to ensure reliable communication. This paper evaluates and compares LoRa’s performance in terms of packet error rate (PER) with and without forward error correction (FEC) in an industrial environment. The impact of integrating an infinite impulse response (IIR) or finite impulse response (FIR) filter into the LoRa architecture is also evaluated. Simulations are carried out in MATLAB at 868 MHz with a bandwidth of 125 kHz and two spreading factors of 7 and 12. Many-to-one and one-to-many communication modes are considered, as are line of sight (LOS) and non-line of Sight (NLOS) conditions. Simulation results show that, compared to an environment with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), LoRa technology suffers a significant degradation of its PER performance in industrial environments. Nevertheless, the use of forward error correction (FEC) contributes positively to offsetting this decline. Depending on the configuration and architecture examined, the gain in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using a 4/8 coding ratio ranges from 7 dB to 11 dB. Integrating IIR or FIR filters also boosts performance, with additional SNR gains ranging from 2 dB to 6 dB, depending on the simulation parameters.

Reliability of LoRaWAN Communications in Mining Environments: A Survey on Challenges and Design Requirements

“…However, it was tested on a newly deployed LoRaWAN system and hence needs to be studied with more realistic scenarios. Forward error correction (FEC) using the inbuilt hamming code with a code rate of 4/8 at the physical layer was employed in [62] to solve the problem of packet error rate (PER) degradation with LoRa in industrial environments. The PER performance improved considerably with SNR gains of 7 to 11 dB.…”

“…The authors of [62] further improved the FEC scheme by integrating an Infinite Impulsive Response (IIR) or Finite Impulsive Response (FIR) filter into the LoRa architecture, which yielded additional gains in the SNR of 2 to 6 dB. This can make LoRa robust in harsh industrial environments.…”

LoRaWAN for Vehicular Networking: Field Tests for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communication

“…This also translates into a maximum receiver sensitivity of −137 dBm, depending on the exploited transmission parameters like the spreading factor (SF), the bandwidth, and the coding rate (CR). Such a feature resulted in the adoption of LoRaWAN in a myriad of application scenarios, and especially in the harsher ones: in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions [ 1 , 2 ], in industrial contexts [ 3 , 4 ], in underground applications [ 5 , 6 ], in marine and offshore environments [ 7 , 8 ], and in search and rescue procedures in remote areas [ 9 , 10 ].…”