Performance Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN for the Internet of Things

Muhammad Yousuf, Asif

Performance Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN for the Internet of Things

dc.contributor.advisor	Ghaderi, Majid
dc.contributor.author	Muhammad Yousuf, Asif
dc.contributor.committeemember	Rokne, Jon G.
dc.contributor.committeemember	Krishnamurthy, Diwakar
dc.date	2019-06-14
dc.date.accessioned	2019-01-24T16:22:28Z
dc.date.available	2019-01-24T16:22:28Z
dc.date.issued	2019-01-23
dc.description.abstract	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.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Muhammad Yousuf, A. (2019). Performance Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN for the Internet of Things (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/35763
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109504
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.publisher.faculty	Science	en_US
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary	en
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Education--Sciences	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Education--Technology	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Computer Science	en_US
dc.title	Performance Evaluation of LoRa LPWAN for the Internet of Things	en_US
dc.type	master thesis	en_US
thesis.degree.discipline	Computer Science	en_US
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary	en_US
thesis.degree.name	Master of Science (MSc)	en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopy	true