# Performance Evaluation of LoRa Considering Scenario Conditions
## 1 Introduction
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Cellular Communications** & **WSN** & **IoT** \\ \hline High bandwidth & Limited bandwidth & Limited bandwidth \\ Continuous traffic & Sporadic traffic & Sporadic traffic \\ Limited number of devices & High number of devices & Huge number of devices \\ Small area cells & Very small coverage & Wide area cells \\ Expensive network and devices & Reduced network and devices costs & Reduced network and device costs \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Strategy comparison among cellular communications, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Figure 1: Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) stack. The main motivation of this work is characterizing LoRaWAN PHY layer features in order to be able to select the most proper configuration depending on the conditions of the deployment scenario. Concretely, the focus is on a mobile scenario in which the end-node is placed onboard a vehicle; these conditions are similar to those of services that have been lastly associated to this type of radio technologies, such as fleet tracking, goods monitoring, or vehicle state control, among others [6; 7]. As a first step, a theoretical coverage study is presented by means of the expected power-level maps obtained from an accurate radio-network planning tool [8], which makes use of topographic maps and the widely-used Okumura-Hata propagation model. Thereafter, this coverage study is validated by comparing its predictions with the outcomes attained in an experimental sampling campaign. Previous works have demonstrated the need of contrasting the predictions of IoT network planning tools with the results extracted from real experiments [9]. Therefore, in the following sections, a comprehensive exploration of LoRaWAN is conducted by examining its performance under different configurations in different mobile scenarios, namely, urban, suburban, and rural. With the aim of completing this study, in addition to this evaluation under mobility conditions, a nomadic test has been also conducted in the same scenarios in order to find performance differences between them. The main contributions of this work are the following:  
* An exhaustive evaluation of LoRaWAN with emphasis in its adaptation capabilities is presented. * The performance of LoRaWAN in different environments with pre-defined propagation conditions, namely, urban, suburban, and rural is explored. The impact of end-node mobility on the system performance is also discussed. * Under this diversity of scenarios, the best LoRaWAN configuration for each use case is identified and discussed. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, a review of the most prominent works regarding the evaluation of LoRaWAN deployments is presented. Section 3 introduces the main foundations of LoRa and LoRaWAN. The methodology, tools, and equipment used in this work are described in Section 4. Section 5 presents and discusses the results obtained from both the theoretical coverage study and the experimental campaign. Finally, Section 6 concludes this work, presenting the most important findings.