IoT Network Design using Open-Source LoRa Coverage Emulator

Many wireless Internet-of-Things applications require extended battery life ranging from a few months to a few years. Such applications have motivated the recent developments in low power wide area networks, including the rise of Long Range (LoRa) technology. LoRa has a simple modulation scheme designed for extended converge, low battery consumption, and resistance to high interference levels. Thus LoRa is primarily targeted for shared spectrum applications where interference levels are typically higher than controlled spectrum applications where a single operator usually has a dominant control on the quality of service. As a result, it is of paramount importance to carefully design IoT networks while taking into account the impending impacts of interference and propagation environments. This paper presents a novel LoRa network design framework that utilizes a developed open-source emulator to provide a reliable network coverage estimation. The framework is tested in one of the largest open-access IoT network designs in Australia, which enabled the deployment of 294 sensors and 48 gateways. Both the framework and the emulator are implemented using MATLAB scripting, enabling integration with built-in and external radio planning tools. The framework leverages real interference measurements captured using software defined radio that records the spectrotemporal behavior of the existing traffic in the shared band.