# LoRaWAN Base Station Improvement for Better Coverage and Capacity
## 5 Conclusions  
LoRaWAN networks have great potential for the development of new applications and systems. To improve the capacity of standard base stations, add flexibility, and potentially extend the lifetime of end nodes in the network, we designed and demonstrated an upgraded low-cost base station. The upgrade is based on adding a second set of concentrator and antenna, which is practically demonstrated using a low-cost base station design based on microcomputer Raspberry Pi, concentrators iC880A and additional software modifications. This upgrade allows also more flexibility in the positioning of the antennas leading to potentially extended range in certain directions or similar application scenarios. Increased capacity and potentially improved coverage or range can both be very beneficial for the operation of the sensor nodes since these improvements lead to a more successful reception and fewer message repetitions.  
To validate the improvements, two base stations were developed; standard one based on the aforementioned design, and novel dual-concentrator based one. In the first evaluation, a comparison of the number of messages received on them was performed for the real-world communication case and showed that dual-concentrator setup increased the probability of successful reception on the novel base station. This improvement can be very beneficial for the energy consumption of most LoRaWAN end devices or sensor nodes since they are usually battery-powered. Additionally, when metal surface was added behind the antennas of novel base station, the number of received messages increased by 25% which indicated that network coverage can also be easily extended.  
Figure 8: Number of successfully received messages on standard (Case A) and novel (Case B) base station by spreading factor.  
The comparison between communication parameters of the received messages also confirmed the improvement of the proposed base station when used in combination with a metal reflector. Communication between test end node and base stations in the dense urban area showed that messages were received with higher signal strength on the novel base station than on the standard one. The analysis showed that mean RSSI received for messages sent from different locations in 1-2 km range is higher in all spreading factor cases on the novel base station.  
The presented idea of low-cost base station upgrade and its validation demonstrated its feasibility, and it is a proof of concept for improvement of base station coverage and capacity in LoRaWAN. The setup will be further extended to multiple concentrators leading to potentially novel applications and additional further evaluations with multiple end nodes will be conducted to reveal the actual savings in terms of battery power.  
Conceptualization, F.T. and G.S.; methodology, M.B.; software, F.T.; validation, F.T., G.S. and M.B.; formal analysis, F.T.; investigation, F.T. and M.B.; resources, G.S.; data curation, F.T.; writing--original draft preparation, F.T.; writing--review and editing, F.T., G.S. and M.B.; visualization, F.T.; supervision, G.S. and M.B.; project administration, G.S. and M.B.; funding acquisition, M.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) under the project number IP-2019-04-1064.  
Not applicable.