LoRaWAN in the Wild: Measurements from The Things Network

TL;DR

This paper presents extensive measurements and analysis of an operational LoRaWAN network, The Things Network, covering performance, features, and use cases from early deployment to production, providing insights into its real-world behavior.

Contribution

First comprehensive measurement and modeling study of an operational LoRaWAN network, analyzing performance, signal quality, and use cases with empirical data and simulations.

Findings

Packet loss estimates derived from empirical data

Radio signal quality analysis across deployment stages

Performance modeling based on measured data

Abstract

The Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) specification was released in 2015, primarily to support the Internet-of-Things by facilitating wireless communication over long distances. Since 2015, the role-out and adoption of LoRaWAN has seen a steep growth. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have extensively measured, analyzed, and modeled the performance, features, and use cases of an operational LoRaWAN, namely The Things Network. Our measurement data, as presented in this paper, cover the early stages up to the production-level deployment of LoRaWAN. In particular, we analyze packet payloads, radio-signal quality, and spatio-temporal aspects, to model and estimate the performance of LoRaWAN. We also use our empirical findings in simulations to estimate the packet-loss.