Scalability of LoRaWAN in an Urban Environment: A Simulation Study

The Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) communication protocol can be adapted for the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its long geographical coverage, low energy consumption, high capacity, open business model, and low cost. Recently, both academia and industry are attracted to LoRaWAN because of its recent developments and applicability in the IoT environment. Mostly, the IoT concept involves massive end devices distributed over a wide topographical area, hence establishing a high density and large-scale environment. LoRaWAN makes use of six orthogonal spreading factors (SFs) in order to improve spectral efficiency and increase the capacity. In this paper, we focus on the LoRaWAN class A network end devices and the problem of network scalability under high-density urban environment by using both the confirmed and unconfirmed mode of communication. Simulation results show that the urban environment has a high impact on the distribution of SFs, thus leading to low network performance in terms of success ratio. We also observed that the use of acknowledgment limits the scalability of the LoRaWAN due to the duty cycle constraints. However, this study further reveals that elevating the antenna height can significantly improve the performance in an urban area.