Analysis of Capacity and Scalability of the LoRa Low Power Wide Area Network Technology

In this paper we discuss and analyze the recently proposed LoRa low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology when used under the European frequency regulations. First of all, we derive the performance metrics of a single LoRaWAN end device, namely uplink throughput and data transmission time. Then we analyze for several illustrative application scenarios the maximum number of end devices which can be served by a single LoRaWAN base station and discuss the spatial distribution of these devices. It is shown that subject to the channel composition and application requirements, a single cell may include several millions of devices. Also, we show that the capacity of the uplink channel available to a LoRaWAN node strongly depends on the distance from the base station and does not exceed 2 kbit/s. In the concluding section we summarize and discuss the obtained results, and point out few issues which need to be taken into account when making an application using LoRa or deploying a LoRa network.