On the Performance of Multi-Gateway LoRaWAN Deployments: An Experimental Study

A remarkable progress in the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies over the recent years opens new opportunities for developing versatile massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, we focus on one of the most popular LPWAN technologies operating in the license-exempt frequency bands, named LoRaWAN. The key contribution of this study is our unique set of results obtained during an extensive measurement campaign conducted in the city of Brno, Czech Republic. During a three-months-period, the connectivity of a public Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) with more than 20 gateways (GWs) was assessed at 231 test locations. This paper presents an analysis of the obtained results, aimed at capturing the effects related to the spatial diversity of the GW locations and the real-life multi-GW network operation with all its practical features. One of our findings is the fact that only for 47% tested locations the GW featuring the minimum geographical distance demonstrated the highest received signal strength and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Also, our results captured and characterized the variations in the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and SNR as a function of the communication distance in an urban environment, and illustrated the distribution of the spreading factors (SFs) as a result of the adaptive data rate (ADR) algorithm operation in a real-life multi-GW deployment.