Performance Evaluation of LORA Technology: Experimentation and Simulation

In the next years many new technologies for the In-ternet of Things and Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) will be defined, enabling the implementation of more efficient and pervasive systems but also making the development environment wider and more complicated. One emerging solution for LPWAN is LoRa, a wireless technology solution to address increasing demand on end-devices for long-range connectivity, low-power for battery operation, and low infrastructure cost for volume deployment. This paper presents, at first, an exhaustive list of use cases that may be implemented using LPWAN technologies, to highlight their main intrinsic differences and a categorization of them in macro groups. After this overview, the paper focuses on LoRa technology providing: i) characterisation of the link budget and of the packet capture threshold of LoRa Semtech and Microchip transceivers, via experimentation on the field; ii) performance evaluation (e.g., in terms of network throughput) of a LoRa network, via simulations.