LoRa™ wide-area networks from an Internet of Things perspective

In recent years, there are many discussions about the IoT (Internet of Things) concept. LoRa (Long Range) modulation together with LoRaWAN (LoRa Wide-Area Networks) communication protocol can represent a suitable candidate ensuring a high level of performance. The main contribution of the paper is the performance evaluation of the LoRa technology considering the requirements of IoT. In the first part of this paper LoRa technology is summarized by reviewing some aspects regarding the architecture and the security of the technology, meanwhile in the second part of the paper are presented some simulation scenarios. From the obtained results, by simply varying the SF (Spreading Factor) parameter the communication distance and robustness to interferences can be increased, meanwhile the data rate is reduced.