Visible to the public Do LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale?

TitleDo LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale?
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsBor, Martin C., Roedig, Utz, Voigt, Thiemo, Alonso, Juan M.
Conference NameProceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-4502-6
KeywordsCognitive Radio Security, lora, low-power wide-area network, pubcrawl, Resiliency, scalability analysis
Abstract

New Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as Long Range (LoRa) are emerging which enable power efficient wireless communication over very long distances. Devices typically communicate directly to a sink node which removes the need of constructing and maintaining a complex multi-hop network. Given the fact that a wide area is covered and that all devices communicate directly to a few sink nodes a large number of nodes have to share the communication medium. LoRa provides for this reason a range of communication options (centre frequency, spreading factor, bandwidth, coding rates) from which a transmitter can choose. Many combination settings are orthogonal and provide simultaneous collision free communications. Nevertheless, there is a limit regarding the number of transmitters a LoRa system can support. In this paper we investigate the capacity limits of LoRa networks. Using experiments we develop models describing LoRa communication behaviour. We use these models to parameterise a LoRa simulation to study scalability. Our experiments show that a typical smart city deployment can support 120 nodes per 3.8 ha, which is not sufficient for future IoT deployments. LoRa networks can scale quite well, however, if they use dynamic communication parameter selection and/or multiple sinks.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2988287.2989163
DOI10.1145/2988287.2989163
Citation Keybor_lora_2016