Temperature Impact in LoRaWAN—A Case Study in Northern Sweden

• Published in: Sensors
• Main Authors: Níbia Souza Bezerra, Christer Åhlund, Saguna Saguna, Vicente de Sousa
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2019
• Subjects: ADR; IoT; LoRa; LoRaWAN; propagation model; smart city; Northern Sweden; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/s19204414

LoRaWAN has become popular as an IoT enabler. The low cost, ease of installation and the capacity of fine-tuning the parameters make this network a suitable candidate for the deployment of smart cities. In northern Sweden, in the smart region of Skellefteå, we have deployed a LoRaWAN to enable IoT applications to assist the lives of citizens. As Skellefteå has a subarctic climate, we investigate how the extreme changes in the weather happening during a year affect a real LoRaWAN deployment in terms of SNR, RSSI and the use of SF when ADR is enabled. Additionally, we evaluate two propagation models (Okumura-Hata and ITM) and verify if any of those models fit the measurements obtained from our real-life network. Our results regarding the weather impact show that cold weather improves the SNR while warm weather makes the sensors select lower SFs, to minimize the time-on-air. Regarding the tested propagation models, Okumura-Hata has the best fit to our data, while ITM tends to overestimate the RSSI values.