Do LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale?
Title | Do LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale? |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2016 |
Authors | Bor, Martin C., Roedig, Utz, Voigt, Thiemo, Alonso, Juan M. |
Conference Name | Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems |
Publisher | ACM |
Conference Location | New York, NY, USA |
ISBN Number | 978-1-4503-4502-6 |
Keywords | Cognitive 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. |
URL | http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2988287.2989163 |
DOI | 10.1145/2988287.2989163 |
Citation Key | bor_lora_2016 |