# Performance Evaluation of LoRa Considering Scenario Conditions
## 2 Related Work  
Although the appearance and widespread of LoRaWAN are recent, a number of works have been published aiming at analyzing or evaluating its performance in different scenarios or proposing enhancements to the off-the-shelf version of LoRaWAN [7; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19]. From a theoretical perspective, works in [10; 11; 12] analyzed the capacity of LoRaWAN in terms of scalability and node-throughput. All these works concluded that LoRaWAN systems should be carefully configured and dimensioned with the aim of hosting a great number of end-devices. Concretely, in [10], the negative impact of interferences within highly-populated LoRaWAN cells was studied. Authors found some issues related to the co-spreading sequence interference, which notably harms the scalability of LoRaWAN systems. However, as stated in [11], LoRaWAN networks can be generally utilized for fairly dense deployments with relaxed latency or reliability requirements. Thus, in order to ensure the network scalability when the end-device population prominently grows, two measures can be taken: (i) the number of delivered packets per node per day should be reduced; or (ii) the number of gateways should be increased [12]. As mentioned above, some works have proposed enhancements to the original LoRaWAN features [13; 14]. In [13], authors presented a solution to improve the overall security of a LoRaWAN-based IoT system. This proposal employed proxy-nodes for performing the cryptographic operations in order to avoid heavy computation in the constrained end-nodes. In turn, work in [14] presented an integration of IPv6 into LoRaWAN. Similar to the case of 6 LoWPAN, this solution permitted a higher interoperability of the IoT network with the outside world. Although interesting,both works lacked of a detailed performance evaluation to demonstrate the impact of their proposals on the system operation. From a different perspective, other studies presented the results extracted from experimental tests conducted in diverse scenarios and situations [15; 16; 17; 18; 19]. These works focused on evaluating the performance of LoRaWAN under different propagation and environmental conditions. For example, in [15], a real LoRaWAN deployment was evaluated and it was found that the base-station antenna location and elevation have great importance in the network performance. The measurements were carried out using three different base-stations. A similar experimental study was elaborated in [16]. In this case, authors focused on tuning the LoRaWAN PHY layer, i.e., LoRa, configuration parameters, identifying both Spreading Factor (SF), which will be explained later in detail, and data-rate as the principal factors impacting on the network coverage. Another coverage study focused on LoRa, was presented in [17], but, in this case it was carried out in an indoor scenario. The presented outcomes demonstrated the robustness of LoRa in adverse industrial environments, even with high data-rates. In turn, authors of [18] investigated the coverage of LoRaWAN in different environments by placing the end-device onboard a car and a boat. Interesting coverage ranges over 10 km were reached with a not excessive Packet Loss Rate (PLR). A more elaborated work was developed in [19], in which the same authors extended their measurements and evaluated the performance of the system under mobility conditions. From a simulation perspective, the work in [7] focused on vehicular scenarios and examined the performance of LoRaWAN in vehicular opportunistic networks, showing better results in comparison with WiFi technology. As observed in the reviewed works, the coverage range and the performance of different LoRaWAN configurations were evaluated. However, these studies did not characterize the sampling points depending on their adversity against wireless transmissions. In this work, we evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN under three well-defined conditions, namely, urban, suburban, and rural scenarios.