Indoor Body-to-Body LoRa Link Characterization

This contribution examines the performance of LoRa in an indoor, body-centric IoT context. This was achieved by deploying custom-made wearable LoRa nodes, featuring a textile substrate-integrated-waveguide antenna, on the chests of test persons who walked around in a modern office environment, logging the strength of the link between them. Both the influence of the test person's bodies as well as the challenging environment, which includes large masses of reinforced concrete, are investigated. The measured channel characterization data illustrate the excellent performance achieved by combining the building penetration qualities of signals at sub-GHz frequencies and the high link budget of the LoRa modulation standard.