Measurements of LoRa Propagation in Harsh Environment: Numerous NLOS Areas and Ill-Conditioned LoRa Gateway

Private/local wireless networks based on LoRa with Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been paid much attention. Important issues of the LoRa based network are non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environment and inappropriate of LoRa gateway. This paper studies propagation characteristics for LoRa communications operated at 920MHz band in a harsh environment, which is assumed that i) numerous NLOS environment in the communication area and ii) high buildings surrounding the LoRa gateway. For the evaluation of the propagation characteristic in the harsh environment, we measure averaged received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values in a university campus. Based on the measurement results, we obtain the outage probability and the path loss model. These results indicate that the harsh environment causes the reduction of the communication area, i.e., the path loss model which is obtained from the measurement data almost follows COST-231 Walfisch- Ikegami model.

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