Experiencing LoRa Network Establishment on a Smart Energy Campus Testbed

The fundamental properties of long-range (LoRa) performance have been revealed by previous research, but advanced issues remain unresolved. This paper tackles three technical challenges that are confronted when establishing a LoRa network on a smart energy campus testbed in Korea. First, the communication range of LoRa in a combined indoor and outdoor environment has yet to be determined. To address this problem, this study builds a LoRa testbed from which we measure the propagation properties of radio signals in a combined environment. Then, we establish a simplified path loss model for LoRa PHY and compute the communication range. Next, national regulations enforce the use of the Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) scheduling scheme, but its performance has never been examined. This paper enumerates the impacts of LBT, threshold values, back-off algorithms, and application parameters on LoRa Medium Access Control (MAC) performance. Last, the application parameters required by the smart energy scenario influence LoRa performance, but their impacts have been scarcely reported. Based on the application parameters and experimental results, this paper proposes a strategy to deploy LoRa gateway(s) and nodes on the campus. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that considers performance issues when establishing a LoRa network on a real-world application testbed.