Performance Evaluation of LoRaWAN Propagation Models for Real-Time IoT Deployments

LoRaWAN protocol has shown promising benefits to diverse IoT verticals by enabling information exchange over long distances via their gateways and enable full sensor coverage while maintaining low power consumption, a long battery lifetime, and transmission across large geographic distances. However, the planning, deployment, and management of LoRaWAN roll-outs are challenging. While several path loss models have been proposed to improve the transmission of packets between sensor nodes and remote gateways, the quality of the data transmission becomes a concern. In this paper, we study four path loss propagation models and test them in a simulation environment in order to identify which model offers better transmission and coverage qualities.The results of experiments show how the Free Space Path Loss (FSPL) model achieves 68% better accuracy performances against baseline propagation models in terms of signal propagation and full sensors' coverage.