LoRa for the Internet of Things

New transceiver technologies have emerged which enable power efficient communication over very long distances. Examples of such Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN)technologies are LoRa, Sigfox and Weightless. A typicalapplication scenario for these technologies is city wide meter reading collection where devices send readings at very low frequency over a long distance to a data concentrator (one-hop networks). We argue that these transceiversare potentially very useful to construct more generic Internet of Things (IoT) networks incorporating multi-hop bi-directional communication enabling sensing and actuation. Furthermore, these transceivers have interesting features notavailable with more traditional transceivers used for IoT networks which enable construction of novel protocol elements. In this paper we present a performance and capabilityanalysis of a currently available LoRa transceiver. We describe its features and then demonstrate how such transceivercan be put to use efficiently in a wide-area application scenario. In particular we demonstrate how unique featuressuch as concurrent non-destructive transmissions and carrier detection can be employed. Our deployment experiment demonstrates that 6 LoRa nodes can form a network covering 1.5 ha in a built up environment, achieving a potential lifetime of 2 year on 2 AA batteries and delivering data within 5 s and reliability of 80%.