Feasibility of LoRa for Smart Home: Real Time and Coverage Considerations

The adoption of LoRa technology has seen significant growth globally. By offering long-range connection, low power consumption, and scalability, LoRa technology has opened up prospects for a variety of Internet of Things applications. This study demonstrates the feasibility of utilizing LoRa technology for smart home applications. The entire system consists of a LoRa home area network, a cloud-based server, and a mobile application. The negative impact caused by real-world installation conditions that are not addressed by other studies are analyzed through the comparison between installed and not installed cases. The methodology to compute the LoRa transmission delay, communication distance, and link quality with the presence of various barriers is provided. To reduce the LoRa transmission delay, we suggest appropriate LoRa physical layer parameters while the long-range coverage capability of LoRa is significantly shortened. The results of experiments which are conducted in both outdoor and indoor environments confirm the accuracy of the coverage computation method. The transmission delay is 18 ms for a physical layer payload length of 39 bytes, which is adequate for smart home applications. The maximum communication distances of outdoor and indoor trials are 440 m with a packet reception ratio of 96%, and 36.73 m with a packet reception ratio of 43%, which are far more than needed. Additionally, we explore the modeling of indoor signal propagation influenced by multipath signals, using Rayleigh and Rician distributions to capture the variations in signal strength due to environmental dynamics. Through rigorous testing in diverse environments, we provide empirical support for specific LoRa physical layer parameter configurations that optimize transmission delays and maintain robust coverage.