Empirical evaluation of LORA link performance for Smart City/Smart Campus environments

The Concept Of Smart City Become Undeniable Mission By All The Major City In The World To Improve Human lifestyle, assets and resources efficiently. Smart city concept really depends of advancement of network technology, to be specific internet of things (IoT). One of the recent innovations that enable smart city concept to be operated with low power consumption and low cost is LoRa (long range). LoRa’s advantages such as convenience, low cost, high efficiency and strong scalability might be a reliable gateway for sensors, transducers and monitoring devices to establish a seamless connection with centralized monitoring system [11]. This report aims to provide data analysis on implementation of LoRa technology as gateway for smart city. In the report, LoRa gateway link performance will be tested using RF1276 LoRa modules from Appcon Wireless for Kuala Lumpur smart city and International Islamic University Malaysia Gombak Campus for smart campus. The performance metrics to be used are the Packet Deliver Rate (PDR), Data Extraction Rate (DER), the number of dropped packet, delay, Node Energy Consumption (NEC) and Ping Statistics. The study is expected to consider the effect of foliage specifically for the smart campus environment. Furthermore, the overall channel effect, payload size and different LoRa PHY transmit configurations (different bandwidths and coding rates) will be quantified in terms of the performance metrics mentioned above. Initial tests were carried out in IIUM Gombak campus indicated severe degradation due to foliage effect, hence, the report will focus on its effect on the link performance. Several LoRA physical parameters will be studied including the bandwidth and spreading factor

Service Oriented Architecture for interconnecting LoRa devices with the cloud

Summarization: The contribution of this work is two-fold: First, we show how Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) can be interconnected with the cloud; second, leveraging on PaaS functionality, we develop LoRaWare, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and system that allows developers to enhance the capabilities of LoRa enabled applications using advanced cloud services such as, selective publication and subscription to data, IoT connectivity using MQTT protocol, persistent storage etc. We experimented with LoRa and LoRaWAN, the latest successful representative of LPWAN protocols. We applied a typical experimental setup with LoRa environmental sensors transmitting measurements over long distances to gateways. LoRa gateways receive LoRa packets from sensors in range and re-transmit them to the cloud using an IP protocol (typically UDP). In this work, we opt for MQTT, a more elaborate lightweight publish-subscribe IP protocol offering advanced security, better routing control and visibility of the communication (i.e. easier handling and control of data packets). To support connection of LoRa IoT networks with the cloud, we developed the Network Server, a cloud service that encompasses the necessary functionality for porting LoRa packets to applications (i.w. encrypts/decrypts, de-duplicates, authenticates LoRa packets and converts LoRa payloads to JSON). We developed our solution in Fiware, the cloud infrastructure of the European Union. The reason for our selection is that, currently, Fiware supports interconnection with LoRa only via the network of another provider (i.e. The Things Network). The Network Server is the only solution for connecting LoRa networks directly to Fiware. We run an exhaustive set of experiments in order to study system response time and scalability as well as, the practical range efficiency of LoRaWAN protocol.Presented on