Performance Evaluations of LoRa Wireless Communication in Building Environments

The Internet of things presents tremendous opportunities for the energy management and occupant comfort improvement in smart buildings by making data of environmental and equipment parameters more readily and continuously available. Long-range (LoRa) technology provides a comprehensive wireless solution for data acquisition and communication in smart buildings through its superior performance, such as the long-range transmission, low power consumption and strong penetration. Starting with two vital indicators (network transmission delay and packet loss rate), this study explored the coverage and transmission performances of LoRa in buildings in detail. We deployed three LoRa receiver nodes on the same floor and eight LoRa receiver nodes on different floors in a 16-story building, respectively, where data acquisition terminal was located in the center of the whole building. The communication performance of LoRa was evaluated by changing the send power, communication rate, payload length and position of the wireless module. In the current research, the metrics of LoRa were quantified to facilitate its practical application in smart buildings. To the best of our knowledge, this may be the first academic research evaluating RTT performance of LoRa via practical experiments.