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LoRaWAN technology's reliability is challenged by weather parameters, which can influence the communication channel design, especially when dealing with outdoor devices. We propose to analyze this effect by evaluating the relationship between the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and different weather parameters, as well as its temporal changes. A rigorous statistical analysis of the RSSI sequences is conducted to assess if they could be represented by a specific statistical model. For this purpose, several models are investigated. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms cover machine learning (ML) and deep learning methods are appealing when dealing with time series forecasting. Nevertheless, the classical autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model can be an attractive alternative due to its simplicity. Therefore, this work proposes a comparative study of ARIMA, AI, and hybrid approaches to forecast the RSSI using weather parameters as regressors. The considered AI algorithms are the artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Also, hybrid models are constructed, coupling the ARIMA with them. The models are evaluated in time series of RSSI, measured by eight different LoRaWAN transmitter nodes and considering the temperature, pressure, relative humidity, and rain as weather parameters. Our analysis reveals that temperature is the dominant factor among weather parameters, and negatively affects RSSI. The ARIMA model that uses only the temperature as a regressor provides consistently better fits than the ARIMA without regressors. Moreover, coupling the ARIMA with the temperature as a regressor and the ANN (ARIMA-ANN) is the best option among the pure AI and hybrid approaches. However, it provided accuracy measures very close to those obtained from the ARIMA model fitted in the first stage, with similar performance. Therefore, the ARIMA model considering the temperature is the most competitive alternative when analyzing RSSI measurements, with the advantage of being the most straightforward method. These results suggest that the RSSI from the analyzed LoRaWAN receiver nodes may not present nonlinear patterns and, considering several weather parameters, they are affected mainly by the outdoor temperature.
Guerra et al. (Sat,) studied this question.