Measurement, Characterization and Modeling of LoRa Technology in Multi-floor Buildings

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development of LoRa technology, together with extensive studies trying to understand its performance in various application settings. In contrast to measurements performed in large outdoor areas, limited number of attempts have been made to understand the characterization and performance of LoRa technology in indoor environments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of LoRa technology in multi-floor buildings. Specifically, we investigate the large-scale fading characteristic, temporal fading characteristic, coverage and energy consumption of LoRa technology in four different types of buildings. Moreover, we find that the energy consumption using different parameter settings can vary up to 145 times. These results indicate the importance of parameter selection and enabling LoRa adaptive data rate feature in energy-limited applications. We hope the results in this paper can help both academia and industry understand the performance of LoRa technology in multi-floor buildings to facilitate developing practical indoor applications.