Performance Analysis of LoRa Communication in Suburban Environments

Each day, our surroundings are becoming smarter through integration into the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. IoT networks demand reliability, seamlessness, and energy efficiency. Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies have emerged as a promising solution to fulfill these IoT requirements. This paper explores Long-Range (LoRa), one of the LPWAN technologies that has garnered significant interest recently, offering low data rates, extended communication range, cost-effectiveness, and minimal power consumption. This work focuses on evaluating the performance of LoRa networks in a suburban environment using the British University in Egypt’s campus as the simulation’s environment. The performance is evaluated in terms of energy consumption, and data extraction rate by simulating three different scenarios using the Framework of LoRa (FLoRa) simulation tool. The first scenario examines the impact of varying certain transmission parameters on the performance of LoRa network. The second scenario evaluates the behavior of the network while increasing the number of nodes. Furthermore, the coverage of LoRa gateway is tested in different regions in the third scenario.