Long-Term LoRa Experiments in a Chemical Plant

We report on multi-month experiments of a LoRa network deployed in a chemical plant. Using measurement data of nodes distributed (i) inside a building and (ii) over multiple buildings, all sending to a gateway, we estimate the path loss and fading characteristics of the links. Although we operate the system in a harsh environment according to these measurements—with a path loss exponent up to 5.1 and Nakagami fading with m as low as 0.7—the packet loss rate is low for in-building links (2.5% on the average), demonstrating LoRa’s suitability for certain industrial applications.