Browsing by Author "Muhammad Yousuf, Asif"

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    Performance Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN for the Internet of Things
    (2019-01-23) Muhammad Yousuf, Asif; Ghaderi, Majid; Rokne, Jon G.; Krishnamurthy, Diwakar
    The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of LoRa (Long Range), which is a leading Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). This work considers two scenarios: performance with indoor gateways and performance with outdoor gateways. Initially, this work studies the feasibility of building a low-cost IoT net- work, where the end devices and gateways are made of do-it-yourself (DIY) off-the-shelf hardware components. This work continues by analyzing the importance of understanding the capabilities and limitations of this technology in terms of its throughput, coverage, scalability and power consumption. Using real-world measurements with commercially-deployed devices from a city-wide LoRa deployment, this work aims to characterize the throughput and coverage of LoRa. Using a custom-built simulator, this work presents extensive simulation results, in order to characterize the scalability and power consumption analysis of LoRa under a variety of traffic and network settings. Our measurement results for the do-it-yourself (DIY) LoRa network (indoor gateways) setup shows that i) indoor coverage is sufficient to cover an entire seven-storey office building with minimal packet drop, ii) outdoor coverage is very dependent on the environment; in our experiments, a communication range of 4:4 km was achieved with only 15% packet drop, iii) network parameters such as spreading factor and packet size greatly affect the coverage; for example, we observed that a payload size of 242 bytes leads to 90% packet drop versus less than 5% drop with a payload size of 1 byte. Our measurement results with commercially-deployed gateways show that as few as three gateways are sufficient to cover a dense urban area within an approximately 15 km radius. Additionally, a single gateway can support as many as 10 [to the factor of 5] end devices, each sending 50 bytes of data every hour with negligible packet drops. On the negative side, while a throughput of up to 5:5 Kbps can be achieved over a single 125 KHz channel at the physical layer, the throughput achieved at the application layer is substantially lower, less than 1 Kbps, due to network protocols overhead.