EXpLoRa2

LoRa has gained significant momentum among industrial and research communities, with several  device manufacturers adopting the LoRa technology in their IoT solutions. However, in spite of LoRa’s wide penetration, the resulting performance under realistic conditions and real-life scenarios has only recently been considered and mainly under line-of-sight environments. For instance, issues like communication across multiple floors and the performance degradation impact of interference have not been analyzed in detail. In the EXpLoRa proposal, we aim to answer the previously identified inquiries from the side of a technology adopter company, namely domX SME, which develops custom IoT monitoring solutions and considers the adoption of LoRa technology for covering the company’s needs.

Through the EXpLoRa experiment, we executed LoRa experiments, under realistic city-scale and varying channel conditions (range of ~35 dB, LOS/ NLOS), under controlled high interference conditions and under typical multi-floor buildings. For the purposes of our experiment, NITOS testbed provided full access to ±20 LoRa nodes and one LoRa Gateway with an additional Monitor interface to capture the prevailing channel occupancy. The set of conducted experiments employed all 12 LoRa end nodes, the 8 available channels,  3 different transmission power levels (0,7,14 dBm), 10 Transmission modes (modulation settings) and multiple payload sizes. In total, more than 200K LoRa packets were transmitted and analysed within the RSSI range of --75 and -137 dBm.