Performance Analysis of Low Power Long Range Protocol LoRaWAN for Embedded Applications

LoRaWAN is a key technology for the Internet of Things. Generally, IoT application requires infrequent transmission of small data. The challenges in deploying wireless access technology for IoT are the deployment of large number of nodes and power constrained transmission. Among the available technologies, LoRaWAN ensures the ability to handle large number of nodes, less power consumption, longer transmission range and cheaper communication module. This paper presents a performance evaluation of LoRa network in respect to those claims. The work analyses the performance using network simulator ns3 and in real time. The performance study was carried out in terms of packet delivery ratio, received power per transmission, selection of spreading factor and communication range. The result shows that the performance of LoRa network depends highly on the selection of spreading factor, distance of the nodes from the gateway, communication channel and number of nodes. By analysing the results possible solutions to the existing challenges can be suggested.