Understanding the tradeoffs of LoRaWAN for IoT-based Smart Irrigation

As LoRaWAN has been increasingly used in the Internet of Things (IoT) smart agriculture, efficacious deployments of this technology need a clear understanding of its performance and scalability tradeoffs. This paper proposes a two-step methodology to evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN based on simulation for understanding the behavior of the air interface and measurement for understanding the behavior of the IoT Platform. We conducted a performance analysis study in a smart irrigation scenario, varying the distance from sensors to the gateway, the sensor density (number of sensors), and the LoRaWAN spreading factor. Our results show that the LoRa air interface poses the most stringent scalability limits, mainly related to the number of sensors actively transmitting from a farm parcel to the gateway. The IoT Platform adds some delay but does not notably interfere with the overall performance of the solution.