Coverage and penetration measurements for Low Power Wide Area Network signals

Jernej Grosar (2017) Coverage and penetration measurements for Low Power Wide Area Network signals. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are evermore widespread and play from day to day a bigger role in our lives. Up to date, such networks use multi-hop short-range wireless technologies such as ZigBee, Z-Wave or Bluetooth. This technologies are unpractical to use, if one wants the coverage of an area in the size of a city. Lately, new technologies called Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) emerged. They have greater range, longer battery life (they can work on single battery for few years) and they mostly use single-hop wireless communication. One such technology, which we will focus on in this master's thesis, is a Long Range Radio or LoRa for short. The goal of our work is to develop an open source, free to use, scalable research platform for conducting short or long term LoRa signal penetration and coverage measurements. With this platform finished, we focused on performing a LoRa signal penetration and coverage measurements in different environments. For all this measurements the same sets of LoRa modulation parameter settings were used, so one can easily compare the signal propagation in different environments. We mainly focused on urban and indoor measurements, but few range tests were also conducted. In one of this range tests, the distance of 39 kilometers was achieved. At this point the signal was still quite strong and packet reception was still satisfying, but due to technical problems, measurement had to be finished.

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