Effect of Downlink Traffic on Performance of LoRaWAN LPWA Networks: Empirical Study

Today the LoRaWAN is among the most widely adopted Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies. In contrast to the other alternatives, LoRaWAN enables deploying both continent-wide public networks, and private networks composing one or several gateways. In this paper, we empirically investigate how does the presence of the downlink traffic affects the performance of uplink for LoRaWAN operating in 868 MHz EU bands. Our results show that in real-life the downlink transmissions can compromise performance of uplink and must be accounted for when planning a network. Also we demonstrate the effects that the selection of secondary frequency channels and data rates have on the performance of a LoRaWAN network. The reported results reveal new dependences and provide the ground truth reference for the future analytical works. For these reasons, the paper can be of interest to both practitioners, planning and deploying LoRaWAN networks, and the researchers performing analytical work on LoRaWAN.