An Analysis of LoRa Low Power Technology and its Applications

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has exponentially increased in the last decade. With the increase in these devices, there is a necessity to effectively connect and control these devices remotely. Cellular technologies cannot handle this demand since they are not cost effective and easy to deploy. This is where LoRa technology comes handy. LoRa is long-range, low-power, low cost technology that supports internet of things applications. LoRa has many advantages in terms of capacity, mobility, battery lifetime and cost. It uses the unlicensed 915MHz ISM band and can be easily deployed. This research is focused on setting up a LoRa base-station to observe the functionality, reliability and limitations of the LoRa protocol. As a first step, the MultiTech gateway and node was set up and the IBM Watson (IBM BlueMix) IOT platform was used to transmit and receive messages. Information like temperature, pressure, accelerometer reading and location in terms of latitude and longitude could be sent to the MultiTech Conduit (gateway/concentrator) by simply sending a message from the mDot end device. Different sensors can be incorporated into the current setup and the functionality of the node can be enhanced by using Node-Red platform that allows programming the devices in use. Future work will involve setting up a base station using the OpenChirp infrastructure with LoRaBug (node) and the OpenChirp Gateway