Investigation on Data Acquisition Accuracy for Long Range Communication Using RFM LoRa

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is a new wireless technology which is designed for low power with long-range communication. Long Range (LoRa) is one of the primary solutions of the technology. The objective of this work is to build a simple prototype device for the purpose of testing the long-range communications by means of Radio Frequency Modulation (RFM) LoRa and to investigate the accuracy of data transmitted using this technology by varying the distance between transmitter and receiver as well as data packet size. LoRa SX1276 is used for the testing purpose as it is mostly available in our country, Malaysia. For that purpose, LoRa transmitter and receiver node are integrated with small and simple microcontroller Arduino Uno and Raspberry as an interface of the communication. Consequences, data has been transmitted and received by both devices transmitter and receiver to investigate the effects related to their distance and different data packet. With the fixed value of spreading factor of 7, it could be observed, that, as the size of transmitted data is bigger, the longer the time required is and the accuracy is reduced. It could be seen that, for a small data size (200bytes), the accuracy is considerable good with the value around 90%.