LoRa Wide Area Network Pragmatic Heterogeneous IoT Applications, Deployment Using Different Spreading Factors

Long Range Low Power Wide Area Network (LoRa LPWAN) offers ubiquitous connectivity in IoT applications, while keeping network structure and management simple. The technology is offering developers an attractive route to build IoT installations involving sensors located at kilometers rather than meters from the nearest gateway. LoRa uniquely relies on 6 spreading factors (SFs) ranging from 7 to 12. Higher distances are covered by the use of higher SFs at the expense of reduced data rate. On the other hand, higher SF consumes longer transmission time on air. The technology had been widely deployed world- wide and in order to support scientific research several network simulators have been conducted to answer the what-if analysis. This paper presents an Omnet++ simulation model developing the two conventional SF allocation schemes; modeling LoRaWAN with SF tiers representing Adaptive Data Rate activation and parallel quasi-orthogonal SF network. Moreover, the simulation model allows for heterogeneous IoT application deployment that shall act as a pragmatic network planning tool. The idea is to utilize fast transmissions of smaller SF networks by configuring end-devices with applications of large packet sized to use the small SF networks and utilize the developed simulator to inspect and analyze network performance.