Measurement, Characterization, and Modeling of LoRa Technology in Multifloor Buildings

In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development of the long range (LoRa) technology, together with extensive studies trying to understand its performance in various application settings. In contrast to measurements performed in large outdoor areas, a limited number of attempts have been made to understand the characterization and performance of the LoRa technology in indoor environments. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of the LoRa technology in multifloor buildings. Specifically, we investigate the large-scale fading characteristic, temporal fading characteristic, coverage, and energy consumption of the LoRa technology in four different types of buildings. Moreover, we find that the energy consumption using different parameter settings can vary up to 145 times. These results indicate the importance of parameter selection and enabling the LoRa adaptive data rate feature in energy-limited applications. We hope the results in this article can help both academia and industry understand the performance of the LoRa technology in multifloor buildings to facilitate developing practical indoor applications.