Automated Estimation of Link Quality for LoRa: A Remote Sensing Approach

Many research and industrial communities are betting on LoRa to provide reliable, long-range communication for the Internet of Things. This new radio technology, however, provides widely heterogeneous coverage; a LoRa link may span hundreds of meters or tens of kilometers, depending on the surrounding environment. This high variability is not captured by popular channel models for LoRa, and on-site measurements-a common alternative-are impractical due to the large geographical areas involved. We propose a novel, automated approach to estimate the coverage of LoRa gateways prior to deployment and without on-site measurements. We achieve this goal by combining free, readily-available multispectral images from remote sensing with the right channel model. Our processing toolchain automatically classifies the type of environment (e.g., buildings, trees, or open fields) traversed by a link, with high accuracy (>90%) and spatial resolution (10 × 10m²). We use this information to explain the attenuation observed in experiments. As signal attenuation is not well captured by popular channel models, we focus on the Okumura-Hata empirical model, hitherto largely unexplored for LoRa, and show that i) it yields estimates very close to our observations, and ii) we can use our toolchain to automatically select and configure its parameters. A validation on 8,000+ samples from a real dataset shows that our automated approach predicts the expected signal power within a ~10dBm error, against the 20-40dBm of popular channel models.