Investigation on BPSK Modulated LoRaWAN for Data Rate Enhancement

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an upcoming and promising technology that involves efficient transmission techniques to communicate data obtained from sensory devices in the developed application. The role played by the channel characteristics between these devices is significant, as quality of service metrics are vital factors in determining the performance of the application. To support long-distance communication, LoRaWAN technology is being used in most of the IoT-enabled automation systems. It provides a wider coverage area and encodes the information using Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). A low data transmission rate is found to be its major limitation. This research investigates the bit error rate (BER) behaviour of LoRa when the sensed data are modulated with BPSK under different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The impact of the spreading factor on data rate is also analyzed. From the MATLAB simulation results, it is found that an increase in the spreading factor reduces the data rate and vice versa. Hence, to obtain a better data rate, a lesser spreading factor is suggested.