LoRa Performance in Industrial Environments: Analysis of Different ADR Algorithms

Long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) technology can be a good candidate for industrial applications in the Internet of Things and adaptive data rate (ADR) algorithms help to improve LoRaWAN performance. These algorithms compute a link budget to define the data rate and the transmission power. However, the performance of these algorithms must be evaluated in industrial environments that pose challenging conditions to wireless communications due to obstacles, interference, and movement. Therefore, this article compares the performance of LoRaWAN with six different ADR algorithms using a realistic propagation model from an industrial environment. This research uses the framework for LoRa (FLoRa) environment in objective modular network testbed in C++ (Omnet++) to compare the packet delivery ratio and energy consumption with different gateway locations and data traffic. Results show that the algorithms that decrease the link budget in poor channel conditions have better performance in industrial scenarios. Furthermore, overestimating the channel behavior decreases packet delivery.