Performance Evaluation of the LoRa Protocol in the context of Smart Meter

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of LoRaWAN in smart metering scenarios, demonstrating its ease of deployment, scalability, and suitability for real-time IoT applications under various physical and link conditions.

Contribution

The paper provides an empirical performance assessment of LoRaWAN in realistic smart metering environments, highlighting key physical and link parameter impacts.

Findings

LoRaWAN performs well for real-time smart metering.

Network performance varies with physical location and parameters.

LoRaWAN is easy to set up and configure.

Abstract

In recent years, the use of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is increasing for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In order to demonstrate the application of LPWAN technologies for a realistic smart metering scenario, we set-up and implement a widely used LPWAN protocol which is called LoRaWAN. In this study, the LoRaWAN is implemented by using Multitech devices (end-node and gateway) and the performance of the network is evaluated for different physical (e.g. location, distance etc.) and link parameters (e.g. data rate, transmission power etc.), under the European regulations. To evaluate the performance of the networks, we collected uplink packets in different indoor and outdoor scenarios at various locations. Our results show that LoRaWAN is easy to setup, configurable, scalable, and it performs well for real-time smart metering applications. Moreover, it is necessary to evaluate the physical conditions for the selection of the available system parameters for deploying a robust LoRaWAN network.