Investigating the practical performance of the LoRaWAN technology

Abstract: New innovations, technologies, ideas and businesses are driving the realisation of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision. As with many other fields in technology comes competing protocols and standards, ranging from modulation schema used for transmitting data to security standards used to ensure safe operation and the privacy needs for all involved entities. This thesis looks into one of the competing modulation schema and network protocols for IoT applications: the LoRaWAN protocol. The main contribution of this thesis is a datadriven empirical study that helps verify theoretically obtained results from other authors. Our results also suggest that as long as other signals on the same frequency band uses different modulation techniques (or just other parameters for the same modulation technique), then only the signal to noise ratio is affected without introducing collisions. This affects the scalability and overall practical distance covered by a LoRaWAN. Our general conclusion is that the LoRaWAN as a technology/protocol has its disadvantages, mainly how heavily different traffic profiles may affect the scalability of it and a general lack of hard quality of service guarantees.