A LoRa Network Emulator Using Software Defined Radio

Abstract

Nowadays, the internet of things and its application have rapid growth in the industry and research committee. Many of those applications require long battery life. Such applications have motivated the recent developments in LoRa technology. LoRa has a simple modulation scheme that allows the transmission with low power consumption, low bit rates, and extensive coverage area through an loT network. As a result, the capacity estimation of LoRa networks has paramount importance in the design phase. This paper aims to develop a LoRa network emulator that can represent the LoRa traffic received from thousands of loT devices at a given LoRa gateway. The proposed emulator utilizes a software defined radio (SDR) device and LoRa commercial transceiver to design a realistic network capacity estimation. The proposed network emulator incorporates different wireless channel conditions within the network under study. Furthermore, the transmitted signals from the SDR consider interference scenarios in terms of relative time over lap as well as SIR between interfering signals. The capacity of LoRa networks can be evaluated by the proposed emulator. The presented emulator for capacity evaluation has the advantage that it derives the cumulative distribution that could be supported from the cell-edge towards the cell-center of an individual LoRa gateway. The experimental result shows that the emulator can generate a representative SIR/SNR profile by comparing target emulated traffic signal level cumulative distribution with that measured by a commercial LoRa transceiver. The emulator adopts a calibration process such that the confidence interval for estimated data extraction rate performance is within the scale of ±2 %.