The Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) specification was released in 2015, primarily to support the Internet-of-Things by facilitating wireless communication over long distances. Since 2015, the role-out and adoption of LoRaWAN has seen a steep growth. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have extensively measured, analyzed, and modeled the performance, features, and use cases of an operational LoRaWAN, namely The Things Network. Our measurement data, as presented in this paper, cover the early stages up to the production-level deployment of LoRaWAN. In particular, we analyze packet payloads, radio-signal quality, and spatio-temporal aspects, to model and estimate the performance of LoRaWAN. We also use our empirical findings in simulations to estimate the packet-loss.
New transceiver technologies have emerged which enable power efficient communication over very long distances. Examples of such Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies are LoRa, Sigfox and Weightless. A typical application scenario for these technologies is city wide meter reading collection where devices send readings at very low frequency over a long distance to a data concentrator (one-hop networks). We argue that these transceivers are potentially very useful to construct more generic Internet of Things (IoT) networks incorporating multi-hop bidirectional communication enabling sensing and actuation. Furthermore, these transceivers have interesting features not available with more traditional transceivers used for IoT networks which enable construction of novel protocol elements. In this paper we present a performance and capability analysis of a currently available LoRa transceiver. We describe its features and then demonstrate how such transceiver can be put to use efficiently in a wide-area application scenario. In particular we demonstrate how unique features such as concurrent non-destructive transmissions and carrier detection can be employed. Our deployment experiment demonstrates that 6 LoRa nodes can form a network covering 1.5 ha in a built up environment, achieving a potential lifetime of 2 year on 2 AA batteries and delivering data within 5 s and reliability of 80 .