EXpLoRa - EXperimenting with LoRa products across realistic environments

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 managed to collect a first set of experimental data and familiarize with the LoRa technology and conduct an exhaustive set of experiments with LoRa-compatible devices, under realistic city-scale and varying channel conditions (range of ~35 dB, LOS/ NLOS). For the purposes of our experiment, NITOS testbed provided full access to 12 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 100K LoRa packets were transmitted and analysed within the RSSI range of -102 and -137 dBm.