LoRa Connectivity Analysis for Urban Coverage in Real Mobile Environments

For the last few years, LoRa technology has been affirming itself as one of the most prominent and widely adopted low power wide area technologies. Very compatible with Internet of Things (IoT) applications and urban environments, this technology is capable of long range communications although with small bandwidths, and consequently, low data rates. Nevertheless, the quality of LoRa communications, like many other wireless technologies, are highly dependent on the transmission's context. In this work, we evaluate the performance of LoRa communications in a mobile sensing scenario, and study its capability to give wireless coverage to a small-size city. Experimental results show that velocity has a consistent and increasing impact on the packet delivery ratio, and that the coverage capability is much more dependent on the terrain distribution and Line-of-Sight (LoS), than on the distance between the mobile node and the gateway.