On the Real Capacity of LoRa Networks: The Impact of Non-Destructive Communications

Abstract

LoRa technology has recently gained popularity, becoming one of the most promising low power wide area technologies for the Internet of Things due to its proprietary modulation scheme, the use of unlicensed sub-GHz frequency bands, and a non-destructive communication property, enabling that the reception of a packet is not interfered by the transmission of one with weaker signal. Based on an exhaustive evaluation setup, this work characterizes the capture effect in the event of two or more LoRa concurrent transmissions. These results are afterwards used to evaluate the real performance of large scale Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) based on the LoRaWAN protocol, showing that the real network capacity of LoRaWAN does not follow the traditional pure Aloha performance, widely used in the literature.