An Analysis of the Effect of LoRaWAN Network Parameters on the Network Performance in the Real Environment

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol, typically LoRaWAN in IoT devices, is an emerging wireless network protocol that has been studied and tested in recent times. In this paper, we analyze the LoRaWAN protocol through evaluating the effect of configuration parameters in the LoRaWAN network on the network performance in the real environment on the 920-923Mhz band. The evaluation focuses on the impact of the LoRaWAN parameters such as Spreading Factor (SF), Payload Length (PL) data length (PL), Adaptive Data Rate (ADR), Frequency channel (FC) and distance. The performance of the LoRaWAN network was evaluated via RSSI, SNR, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Time on Air (ToA). Results shows that, Payload length (PL) significantly affects PDR, increased SF will increase PDR but will also cause ToA increase, ADR activation has improved PDR at close distance and far from fixed positions, but the impact is negligible. In addition, the survey between different FC frequency channels has obtained different SNR and PDR