EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF LORAWAN PERFORMANCE IN A REAL-WORLD URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Sammanfattning

The number of connected devices in Internet of Things (IoT) networks has grown rapidly in recent years. This has increased the need for scalable, low-power, and energy-efficient communication technologies. LoRaWAN is a widely used LPWAN protocol that supports long-range communication and low energy consumption in IoT applications. However, the combined effects of environmental conditions, configuration choices, automatic configuration mechanisms, and transmission modes remain insufficiently explored in real-world field experiments. This thesis evaluates LoRaWAN performance through real-world field experiments in a deployed LoRaWAN network. It examines how spreading factor configurations affect reliability under different environmental conditions, how Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) compares to static spreading factor configurations, and what trade-offs confirmed transmission mode introduces compared to unconfirmed transmission mode. The results show that environmental conditions have a stronger overall impact on LoRaWAN performance than the choice of spreading factor configuration. Environments with Line of Sight (LoS) consistently achieve a higher Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) than Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) environments. Higher spreading factors improve PDR in obstructed environments, but they do not achieve the same increase in PDR as having a stable environment instead. ADR shows lower PDR than the best-performing static spreading factor configurations. This suggests that ADR selects transmission parameters that were not optimal in environments with varying channel conditions. The comparison between transmission modes shows that confirmed transmission mode improves reliability but introduces trade-offs in terms of packet delivery timing and channel usage. The findings of this thesis can support configuration choices in LoRaWAN deployments and show that LoRaWAN should be evaluated under actual deployment conditions rather than based only on theoretical assumptions.