Impact of Environmental Parameters on SNR and RSS in LoRaWAN

Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) are widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, as they target key requirements of IoT such as secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services. LoRaWAN uses Long Range (LoRa) physical layer and defines Media Access Control layer and general system architecture. One of the main advantage of the LoRa is flexible configuration, which means that it is possible to increase/decrease the bit rate while decreasing/increasing the range. This feature can be very useful in case when propagation conditions change rapidly and frequently, because it allows to configure spreading factor according to the channel conditions. In this paper, we conducted a study of environmental parameters impact in LoRaWAN. We presented design and realization of the testbed for analysis of the impact of temperature and relative humidity changes on Received Signal Strength (RSS) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) with manual change of data rate/spreading factor. Our results showed that increase of temperature and relative humidity lead to noticeable degradation of network performances in terms of RSS and SNR. Moreover, we observed that snowing lead to high fluctuations in SNR and RSS when Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) is disabled.