Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation

Temperature variations are known to affect the performance of wireless sensor networks deployed outdoors. Whilst the impact of temperature on IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers has long been investigated by the research community, still little is known about how temperature affects the performance of increasingly popular longrange wireless technologies such as LoRa. To fill this gap, this paper presents an experimental evaluation of the reliability of LoRa in the presence of temperature variations. First, we highlight that temperature can have a significant impact on LoRa’s communication performance and show that an increase in temperature can be sufficient to transform a perfect LoRa link into an almost useless one. We then carry out a detailed investigation on the performance of different LoRa physical settings with fluctuating temperatures and show that an optimal selection can help in increasing the probability of packet reception and is hence key to mitigate temperature-induced effects. We believe that our results will serve as a reference to orient researchers and system designers employing LoRa to build large-scale low-power wide area networks.