A Study on the Impact of Nodes Density on the Energy Consumption of LoRa

Abstract

LoRaWAN is one of the leading Low power wide area network (LPWAN) LPWAN technologies that compete for the formation of big scale Internet of Things (IoT). It uses LoRa protocol to achieve long range, low bit rate and low power communication. Large scale LoRaWAN based IoT deployments can consist of battery powered sensor nodes. Therefore, the energy consumption and efficiency of these nodes are crucial factors that can influence the lifetime of the network. However, there is no coherent experimental based research which identifies the factors that influence the LoRa energy efficiency at various nodes density. In this paper, results on measuring the packet delivery ratio, packet loss, data rate and energy consumption ratio ECR to gauge the energy efficiency of LoRa devices at various nodes density are presented. It is shown that the ECR of LoRa is inversely proportional to the nodes density and that the ECR of the network is smaller at higher traffic indicating better network energy efficiency. It is also demonstrated that at high node density, spreading factor SF of 7 and 9 can improve the energy efficiency of the network by 5 and 3 times, respectively, compare to SF 11.