# Improving LoRa Signal Coverage in Urban and Sub-Urban Environments with UAVs

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how UAV deployment height and antenna orientation influence LoRa signal coverage in urban and suburban environments, providing empirical measurements and insights to enhance IoT communication reliability.

## Contribution

It offers new empirical data on UAV-assisted LoRa deployment and analyzes factors affecting signal quality in complex environments.

## Key findings

- UAV height significantly improves suburban LoRa coverage.
- Antenna orientation impacts communication range.
- Signal strength varies with environment and deployment parameters.

## Abstract

LoRa technology enables long-range communication with low-power consumption for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in the urban and suburban environment. However, due to terrestrial structures in urban and suburban environments, the link distance of LoRa transmissions can be reduced. In this paper, we report signal strength measurements for the in-building and inter-building LoRa links and provide insights on factors that affect signal quality such as the spreading factor and antenna orientation. Subsequently, we also provide measurement results in urban and suburban environments when the LoRa transmitter is deployed at different heights using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Our findings show that the UAV deployment height is critical for improving coverage in the suburban environment and antenna orientation affects the communication range.