Towards reliable IoT: Testing LoRa communication

In the last decade, the application of Internet of things expanded to many fields. The whole new range of possibilities to analyze data gathered from connected devices have appeared. However, one of the main problems of IoT is still communication between devices, especially on long range. Reliability of sensor network greatly affects reliability of analysis of collected data, and consequently actions to the analysis results. Therefore, continuous reliable communication in sensor network is necessity. It seems that LoRa is lately recognized as promising communication technology, due to its properties such as low power, long range and high reliability. It is stated that the range of LoRa is up to 10km, but it is not clearly in what measure does the environmental conditions, parameters of devices etc. affects communication distance. This paper aims to test the small sensor network prototype in real-life environment with real-time communication that has long range and ensures high reliability. Several indoor and outdoor experiments were made with same equipment but different distance, modulation, and packet size. The presented results show how changes in parameters such as packet size and techniques such as retransmission significantly affects communication reliability.