## 6 Results and Discussion
### Overall Discussion  
With the aim of accomplishing a finer statistical analysis, it would have been necessary to collect a greater number of packets. Sadly, though, the low data-rate and the limitations on the duty cycle due to the spectrum usage regulations hindered the measurements. Despite it, we deem that the presented method and results could be valuable to render insights into the potentialities of a LoRaWAN network to be employed in a marine environment. Indeed, for the purposes of the application scenario,  
Figure 17: Group #2 SNRs temporal trend: (**a**) \(SF=7\); (**b**) \(SF=8\); (**c**) \(SF=9\); (**d**) \(SF=10\); (**e**) \(SF=11\); (**f**) \(SF=12\). the feasibility of the LoRaWAN communication ashore was successfully proven because of the total amount of 600 packets that were transmitted throughout the trial groups, 530 were correctly received and demodulated (i.e., roughly the 88.3%). Moreover, considering the distribution of the RSSIs portrayed in the relative Figures in Section 6.1, there was enough link margin (i.e., from 25.55 dBm at \(SF=7\) to 36.55 dBm at \(SF=12\) on average) to exploit worse wireless link setups. Some instances are further lowering down the antennas elevations thus reducing their installation complexity, diminishing the transmitter power output thus augmenting the end node battery lifetime or, even though it is not required by the system requirements, covering longer distances. Due to the nature of the application scenario, a more complete analysis on the performance of the communication ashore would have been carried out by considering the behavior of the system whenever different weather conditions, with respect to the one experienced during the measurement campaign, will have to be faced. As it was claimed earlier on, such trials were impossible to be actually analysed due to a logistical constraint associated with the boat we employed to reach the breeding cages. Nevertheless, we do not expect significant path losses caused by meteorological events by virtue of what is reported in the sixth chapter of [PERSON] book [34]. It presents several losses induced by atmospheric effects by showing their models and graphical representations to be taken into account during the design of a wireless link. Moreover, it also points out remedies. Coastal and marine environments are particularly susceptible to fades due to atmospheric multipath and the preferred solution to mitigate such a shortcoming for fixed-length links is to establish an antenna diversity scheme. Hence, this strategy was adopted by employing two antennas at the receiver side. Atmospheric attenuation due to gaseous absorption (e.g., oxygen and water vapor) is not significantly detrimental for sub-GHz wireless links. Indeed, [PERSON] [34] reports plots showing the specific atmospheric attenuation of standard atmosphere and of dry air in function of the frequency for a horizontal path (which can be assumed as the one we presented beforehand). In both the cases, the specific attenuation is less than 0.01 dB/km thus making it negligible for our application. Apart from the gaseous one which has just been treated, there exist two forms of water that affect wireless propagation: precipitation (e.g, rain and snow), and suspended water droplets forming clouds and fog. Snow is directly related to the moisture content of the particles within the air but the effect of its attenuation is relatively smaller with respect to the one due to rain. The latter attenuation is deeply discussed in the tenth chapter of [PERSON] book [34] which concludes that the extent of this kind of loss is less than 0.01 dB/km for sub-GHz applications. On the other hand, clouds and fog rarely contribute to the detriment of a wireless link. Similar considerations may be drawn for what concerns possible antennas orientation mismatches due to the fact that the transmitting one is expected to be mounted on top of a seamark buoy.