3rd International Conference on Advanced Technologies

for Signal and Image Processing - ATSIP'2017,

May 22-24, 2017, Fez, Morroco.

A Study of LoRa Low Power and Wide Area

Network Technology

Umber Noreen Ahcène Bounceur Laurent Clavier

Lab-STICC-UMR CNRS 6285 Lab-STICC-UMR CNRS 6285 IEMN UMR CNRS 8520, Télécom
Université de Bretagne Occidentale Université de Bretagne Occidentale IRCICA FR CNRS 3024
Brest, France Brest, France Lille, France
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

Abstract—LoRaT M is low power wide area wireless network of nuclear power station radiation, weather adaptive street
(LPWAN) protocol for Internet of Things (IoTs) applications. lighting, smart waste management, structural health monitor-
LPWAN has been enabling technology of large scale wireless ing, air pollution monitoring, water leakages monitoring, forest
sensor networks (WSNs). Effective cost, long range and energy fire detection and so forth, as also shown through Figure 1.
efficiency of LPWANs make them most suitable candidates for
smart city applications. These technologies offer novel commu- In a wireless sensor network composed of many spatially
nication paradigm to address discrete IoT’s applications. LoRa scattered wireless nodes, communication is constrained by
is a recently proposed LPWAN technology based on spread various impairments such as the wireless propagation effects,
spectrum technique with a wider band. LoRa uses the entire
network interference, and thermal noise. The effects of signals
channel bandwidth to broadcast a signal which makes it resistant
to channel noise, long term relative frequency, doppler effects propagation in the wireless environment include the attenuation
and fading. This paper focuses on the emerging transmission of radiated signals with distance (also known as path loss),
technologies dedicated to IoT networks. Characteristics of LoRa the blocking of signals caused by large obstacles (also called
are based on three basic parameters: Code Rate (CR), Spreading shadowing), and the reception of multiple copies of the same
Factor (SF) and Bandwidth (BW). This paper provides in depth transmitted signal (also called multipath fading) [5]. The net-
analysis of the impact of these three parameters on the data rate work interference is due to accumulation of unwanted signals
and time on air. radiated by other transmitters from inside or outside of the
Keywords—Wireless sensor Networks, LoRaT M , LPWAN, network, which undesirably affects signal reception at receiver
Smart cities, Internet of things. nodes in the network. The thermal noise is introduced by the
receiver electronics and is usually modeled as additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN).
I. I NTRODUCTION
Due to the scarcity of radio spectrum, it is not completely
The evolving field of WSNs has an extensive range of possible for large wireless networks to communicate without
potential applications in industry, science, transportation, civil interference. Probably other radio devices will make transmis-
infrastructure and security etc. WSNs comprised sensing (mea- sion using the same radio frequency band at the same time.
suring), computation, and communication into a single tiny Consequently, at the receiver, many undesired signals from
device called sensor node [1] [2]. WSNs typically consist of interfering transmitters will add to the desired transmitter’s
a large number of heterogeneous sensor devices that contain signal. This phenomenon is called interference, and it causes a
processing capability, sensor(s) and/or actuator(s), a power performance degradation of communication networks [6] [7].
source (batteries and eventually some energy harvesting mod- This paper gives a short description of Bluetooth, ZigBee
ules), multiple types of memory and a radio frequency (RF) and Wi-Fi, and the brief description of LoRa as LPWAN
based transceiver. This large number of sensors are densely technologies.
deployed over a large field and inter-networked together. They
monitor physical or environmental conditions that generate Rest of article is organized as follows. Section II de-
sensor readings and deliver them to a sink node in order to fines some of the existing potential candidates for LPWAN
be further processed [2]. technologies. Section III describes some key features of
Wireless network industry is gradually changing their in- LoRa technology. Conclusive remarks are drawn at the end
terest towards LPWAN. LPWAN technologies (SigFox, LoRa, in Sections IV.
Weightless-W etc) successfully propose wide area connectivity
from a few to tens of kilometers for low data rate, low II. L OW P OWER W IRELESS T ECHNOLOGIES
power and low throughput applications [3]. Their market is
anticipated to be huge. Nearly a quarter of overall thirty billion Several low power wireless technologies can be utilized
IoT/M2M devices are assumed to be connected through the for WSNs. Choice of a particular technology for a particular
internet using LPWAN [4]. Smart cities are considered as the application can be made by examining required data rates,
biggest potential customers of LPWAN, which includes smart power consumption and range [8]. Some of these major
metering, smart grids, smart parking, optimized driving and communication technologies, which utilizes licensed free ISM
walking routes, energy radiation measurements, measurements bands, have been discussed and compared further in this

1
978-1-5386-0551-6/17/$31.002017
c IEEE
 name suggest are used to exchanged data after the connection
established between sender and receiver [9].

B. ZigBee
The IEEE standard 802.15.4 commonly known as ZigBee
is most popular choice in Low Rate Wireless Personal Area
Networks (LR-WPAN) and WSNs. IEEE standard 802.15.4
has only defined the characteristics of physical (PHY) layer
and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. These charac-
teristics have been adopted by ZigBee. ZigBee has defined
the specifications for network layer and application layer. In
wireless networks, MAC layer allows efficient access of wire-
less physical medium, wireless node associations, data frame
validation and security services. Based on the application
requirements, ZigBee based networks can be centralized and/or
decentralized [10].
Fig. 1. Smart city applications
ZigBee based wireless network can adapt star topol-
TABLE I. C OMPARISON OF COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS . ogy and/or peer-to-peer topology. Star topology offers both
contention-based and contention-free wireless medium access
Bluetooth ZigBee Wi-Fi
Max. end-devices 255 (2 Billion in BLE) more than 64000
Depends on number to its member nodes. In peer-to-peer topology, nodes can
of IP addresses
Peak Current
30 mA 30 mA 100 mA communicate with other nodes within their radio range. De-
Consumption
Range 10 m 10 to 100 m 100 m centralized or peer-to-peer topology based wireless network
11 Mbps and
Data Rate 1 Mbps up to 250 kbps
54 Mbps supports contention-based un-slotted carrier sense multiple
Relative Cost Low Low Medium
Star and
access with collision avoidance CSMA/CA wireless MAC
Topology Star Star and Mesh
Transmission FHSS (Frequency Hopping DSSS (Direct Spread
Point-to-point
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency
protocol. In CSMA/CA protocol nodes compete with each
Technique Spread Spectrum) Spectrum Sequence) Division Multiplexing) other to access the shared wireless medium. More than 64000
nodes can be connected in zigBee where each one needs only
to allocate a role. ZigBee uses direct spread spectrum sequence
section. Also, comparison of some basic features related to (DSSS) transmission technique and offers up to 250 kbps of
these technologies are highlighted in Table I. data rate in 2.4 GHz frequency band [11] [12]. Spreading
techniques are applied to increase the signal bandwidth (BW).
A. Bluetooth DSSS phase shifts a sine wave pseudo-randomly with ”chips”.
These continuous strings or chips are called pseudo-noise (PN)
Bluetooth is a wireless personal area network (WPAN) code symbols or PN-sequence. This phenomenon helps to
technology based on IEEE standard 802.15.1. It was launched increase the signal power, decrease the interference effects on
in 1994 by Ericsson. It utilizes licensed free 2.4 GHz frequency received signal, allows sharing of spectrum among multiple
band with up to 1MHz channel frequency band. Bluetooth users and provides resistance against intended or unintended
adopts frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) transmis- signal jamming. PN-sequence remains known at transmitter
sion technique and offers maximum data rate up to 1Mb/s. and receiver. ZigBee is low power and low cost system which
Conventional Bluetooth can connect eight nodes to each other makes it well suited for WSNs [13]
with seven slave nodes and one master node. Bluetooth based
networks can be deployed in a point-to-point master-slave C. Wi-Fi
manner. The power consumption of any type of communication
network strongly depends on the distance between transmitter Although, Bluetooth and ZigBee are low power and low
and receiver nodes, the preferred power to be retained by the complexity wireless sensor technologies, but they have some
signal and most importantly type of data being exchanged. limitations, such as low data rate, short range, and less pene-
Bluetooth based networks are able to exchange more or less tration across obstacles. With the advancement in the fields of
all types of data like multimedia or text etc. [9]. wireless and system on chip (SoC) technologies, a number
of Wi-Fi based wireless sensor SoCs have been developed
Another extension of Bluetooth was proposed as Bluetooth for low power wireless sensor applications [14]. Wi-Fi is
4.0 also known as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) after the a wireless local area network (LAN) technology based on
Bluetooth 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. It was designed as alternative IEEE standard 802.11. In literature though, IEEE standard
low power solution to classic Bluetooth. Bluetooth and BLE 802.11 and Wi-Fi is used interchangeably, and we will also
are used for different purposes. Conventional Bluetooth can follow the same convention in this paper. IEEE standard 802.11
handle almost all the variety of data, but it consumes more provides set of specifications for media access control (MAC)
power and cost. BLE is used for low data rate applications, and physical layer (PHY) for implementing wireless WLAN
and can therefore, have longer battery life time. Like classic in the frequency band of 900 MHz, 2.4GHz, 3.6GHz, 5GHz
Bluetooth, BLE also utilizes licensed free ISM band and and 60 GHz [15]. 2.4 GHz frequency operation band is most
offers 40 different channels. Three among these are labeled common in many extensions of IEEE standard 802.11, with
as advertising channels and are used establish a connection. 14 distinct channels. Wi-Fi based WSNs could be network-
The remaining 37 channels are labeled as data channels and as centered or data-centered networks and consists of a large

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 TABLE II. C ODE R ATES IN LoRaT M

CR value 1 2 3 4
no. of redundant bits 1 2 3 4
Coding rate 4/5 2/3 4/7 1/2

Fig. 2. Up-chirp and down-chirp waveform

number of low power nodes distributed over the large area.

Wi-Fi offers data rate of 11Mbps to 54Mbps (250 Mbps: Wi-Fi
Direct) with 100 m transmission range. The number of nodes
in the network depends on the number of IP addresses.
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is
the variant of Multi-Carrier Modulation and is employed in
several IEEE Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standards
like IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g. IEEE standards 802.11n
Fig. 3. Data Rates offered in LoRa with different code rate and bandwidth
and 802.11ac also utilize OFDM modulation technique but values, (SF = 7).
coupled with a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) [16].

D. SigFox to interferences and jamming attacks and difficult to decode

by an eavesdropper. Receiver can decodes even a severely
It supports narrowband (or ultra narrowband) technology attenuated signal 19.5 dBs below the noise level [18]. Chirp
with standard radio transmission method called binary phase- spread spectrum (CSS) is a subcategory of DSSS, and it allows
shift keying (BPSK) (going up). Which allows the receiver to to send one bit per each chirp. It takes much larger BW for
only listen in a very small part of the spectrum that mitigates transmission than actually required for the considered data rate.
the noise impact. It requires an inexpensive endpoint radio and A single chirp waveform can be defined as:
a more sophisticated base station to manage the network. These 
transmissions use unlicensed frequency bands [15]. Section II exp(jφ(t)), − T2 ≤ t ≤ T2
c(t) = (1)
defines some of the existing potential candidates for LPWAN 0, otherwise
technologies.
where φ(t) is the phase of chirp waveform. Examples of up-
III. L O RO TECHNOLOGY chirp and a down-chirp waveform are shown in Figure 2.

LPWAN is the rapidly growing area of the communication Apparently, characteristics of LoRa modulation depends on
industry. Amongst the recently introduced low power and long following three parameters:
range technologies, the semiconductor manufacturer Semtech
has introduced extensive utilization of advanced spread spec- Code rate (CR)
trum technologies with their Long-Range LoRaT M product Forward error correction (FEC) techniques are used in Lora
line. In comparison with legacy modulation techniques, the to further increase the receiver sensitivity. Code rate defines the
spread spectrum modulation technique implied in LoRa assures amount of FEC. LoRa offers CR values between 0 to 4, where
an increased link budget as well as better immunity to network CR = 0 means no FEC. LoRa uses code rates of 4/5, 2/3, 4/7
interferences. LoRa utilizes wider band usually of 125 kHz and 1/2, also shown in Table II. Which means, if the code
or more to broadcast the signal. LoRa allows the usage of rate is denoted as k=n, where k represent useful information,
scaleable BW of 125kHz, 250kHz or 500kHz [17]. Usage of and encoder generates n number of output bits, then n − k
a wider band makes LoRa resistant to channel noise, long term will be the redundant bits. The redundancy allows the receiver
relative frequency, doppler effects and fading. But, spreading to detect and often to correct errors in the message, but it
a narrowband signal over wider band makes less efficient use also decreases the effective data rate. Data rates corresponds
of spectrum until the end devices utilize orthogonal sequences to each CR value in LoRa are shown in Figure 3, over three
and/or different channels which result higher overall system bandwidths. As the CR value increases, the effective data rate
capacity. decreases in each bandwidth spectrum.
The transmitter generates chirp signals by varying their
Spreading factor (SF)
frequency over time and keeping phase between adjacent
symbols constant. The transmitted signal is noise alike signal LORa employs multiple orthogonal spreading factors (be-
which is resistant to multipath fading and doppler shifts, robust tween 7 to 12). SF provides a tradeoff between data rate

3
Fig. 4. Spreading in LoRa

Fig. 6. The LoRa Bandwidth Corresponds to the Double Sided Transmit

Spectrum Bandwidth

to the system bandwidth in chips per-second-per-Hertz. So a

LoRa bandwidth of 125 kHz corresponds to a chip rate of
125 kcps.

A. Packet Structure
Figure 7 shows packet structure used by LoRa. LoRa
offers maximum packet size of 256 bytes. The LoRa packet is
composed as follows [20]:

• Preamble field: is used for the synchronization pur-

poses. The receiver synchronized with the incoming
data flow.
Fig. 5. Data Rates offered in LoRa with different spreading factor and
bandwidth values, (CR = 0). • Header field: depends on the choice of two available
operation modes. In default explicit operational mode,
TABLE III. S PREADING FACTORS AND CORRESPONDING C HIP the number of bytes in the header field specifies
LENGTH IN LoRaT M
forward error correction (FEC) code rate, payload
Spreading Factor (SF) Chip Length 2SF length and presence of CRC in the frame. The second
7 128 implicit operational mode specifies that coding rate
8 256 and payload in a frame are fixed. In this mode, frame
9 512 doesn’t contains this field, which gives reduction in
10 1024 transmission time. Header field also contains 2 byte
11 2048 CRC field which allows the receiver to discard packets
12 4096 with invalid header. Header field along with its CRC
field are 4 bytes long and are encoded with 1/2
coding rate, while coding rate for the rest of the frame
and range. Choice of higher spreading factor can increase specifies in PHY header. The first byte of header field
the range but decreases the data rate and vice versa. Each specifies the payload length.
symbol is spread by a spreading code of length 2SF chips.
At the transmitter, the spreading code is subdivided into codes • Payload field: Maximum payload varies from 2 to 255
of length 2SF /SF . Then each bit of symbol is spread using bytes. This field further contains following fields:
the subcode also shown in Figure 4. So, it takes 2SF chips ◦ MAC header: defines the frame type (data
for spreading of one symbol (SF bits × 2SF = SF ), as or acknowledgment), protocol version and its
shown in Table III. This spreading code is also known at the direction (uplink or downlink).
receiver. The substitution of one symbol for multiple chips ◦ MAC payload: contains actual data.
of information means that the spreading factor has a direct ◦ MIC: is used as the digital signature of the
influence on the effective data rate [19]. The relation between payload.
the data rate and the choice of SF is shown in Figure 5, over
three bandwidths. • CRC: is optional and comprises cyclic redundancy
check (CRC) bytes for error protection for payload
At the receiver, spreading code is multiplied by the received (2 bytes).
bits to regenerate the input data. Spreading mechanism can also
see in Figure 4.
B. Time on Air
Bandwidth (BW)
For LoRa, the actual time on the air for a packet can be
LoRa provides three scaleable BW settings of defined as:
125kHz, 250kHz and 500kHz also shown in Figure
6. Transmitter sends the spreaded data at a chip rate equal Tpacket = Tpreamble + Tpayload (2)

4
Fig. 7. LoRaT M packet structure

where Tpreamble is preamble duration and Tpayload is payload

duration. Tpreamble can b defined as:

Tpreamble = (npreamble + 4.25)Ts (3)

where npreamble is the preamble length and Ts denotes time

of 1 symbol and
Fig. 8. LoRaT M packet time on air with BW = 125 kHz and CR = 0
Ts = 1/Rs (4)

with SF as spreading factor, Rs is symbol rate which is

Rs = BW/2SF (5)

The payload time is:

Tpayload = P LSymb × Ts (6)

P LSymb = 8 + max(ceil( 8P L−4SF +28+16CRC−20H

4(SF −2DE) )(CR +
4), 0)

with the following explanations:

• P L : number of payload bytes.

• H : 0 when the header is enabled and 1 when there
is no header. Fig. 9. LoRaT M packet time on air with BW = 125 kHz and SF = 7
• DE : 1 for enabled low data rate optimization and 0
for vice versa.
IV. C ONCLUSION
• CR : code rate.
Various LPWAN technologies are currently contending to
So total time on the air taken by LoRa devices can be gain an edge over the competition and provide the massive
defined by using Equations 2, 3 and 6. connectivity that will be required by the world in which
everyday objects are expected to be connected through wireless
Tpacket = Ts (npreamble + P LSymb + 4.25) (7) network in order to communicate with each other. This paper
focused on one of the most prominent LPWAN technology:
LoRaT M .
From the above calculation, one can say that spreading
factor has a direct influence on the time on air of the LoRa In this work, we have analyzed the performance of LoRa,
packet. Figure 8 shows time on air for a LoRa frame with based on its three basic parameters: code rate, spreading factor
different payload sizes and SF values. Time on air increases and bandwidth. Lora offers five code rates for forward error
with the increase in payload size and SF values. Although correction which permits the recovery of bits of information
higher spreading values highly influence the time on air of a due to corruption by interference. Similarly higher spreading
LoRa packet, but time on air also varied with the change in factor provides longer range. The spreading codes correspond
code rate value. This variation is shown in Figure 9. to each SF are considered as orthogonal. This means that
multiple frames can be exchanged in the network at the same
Same as SF and CR, the third parameter of LoRa mod- time, using one the six different (SF = 7, 8, 9, 10, 12). An
ulation bandwidth, also influence the time on air of a packet. increase in CR and SF values decreases the effective data
Higher the bandwidth means lower the time on air. This is rate and causes increase in time on air of LoRa packet. Choice
shown in Figure 10, with different payload values and CR = 0, of bandwidth also influences on data rate and time on air of a
SF = 7. packet.

5
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