International Journal of Future Generation Communication and Networking Vol. 11, No. 4 (2018), pp.51-68 http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijfgcn.2018.11.4.05 ISSN: 2233-7857 IJFGCN Copyright © 2018 SERSC Australia LoRaWAN Performance Evaluation with Optimized Configuration 1 Ruki Harwahyu 1 *, Alfan Presekal 2 and Riri Fitri Sari 3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia 1 ruki.h@ui.ac.id, 2 presekal@ui.ac.id, 3 riri@ui.ac.id Abstract LoRaWAN is an access technology coupled with protocol stack specification which is exclusively presented to serve IoT application. IoT application commonly has small data and infrequent transmission. However, the challenge in presenting wireless access technology for IoT lies in its characteristic of massive node deployment and power- constrained transmission. Among several technologies, LoRaWAN promises the ability to handle massive number of nodes, longer transmission range, lower power consumption, as well as cheaper communication module. This paper presents a performance evaluation of LoRa network in respect to those claims. The performance of the network in term of packet delivery ratio, average energy consumption per transmission and average energy wasted in collision per nodes are investigated. A realistic scenario is considered, and the scalability study is also conducted via computer simulation. The result shows that the performance of LoRa network is highly dependent to the configuration of spreading factor, coding rate, and frequency selection. The performed experiment shows that the limitation inherited from pure ALOHA access strategy can be alleviated by randomizing frequency selection and node-specific optimization to maximize data rate relative to its location (i.e. channel condition) and contention severity. Keywords: LoRa, LoRaWAN, LPWA, IoT 1. Introduction Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by cloud-connected nodes which are mostly low-cost microcontroller having one or more sensors or actuators with constrained battery life, some of which may be located in remote locations, reporting small amount of data at a time over a communication link to a backend system. Compared to the current traditional Internet, IoT nodes has less memory, less processing power, less bandwidth, and less available energy. Numerous services are envisioned for IoT. IoT, which is also called Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), is expected to be the next revolution in the mobile ecosystem. Many LPWA networks are currently in trial phases or in commercial rollout worldwide because of the attractiveness to create a rapid route to market innovative IoT services. The two leading network technologies contributing to the fast development of LPWA IoT markets are LoRaWAN, and Ultra-Narrowband (UNB). Other LPWA technologies such as Weightless-N, Weightless-P from Weightless SIG and RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access technology) from Ingenu are also commercially deployed and used to support specific vertical use cases. There are also several new 3GPP standards such as EC-GSM, LTE-M and NB-IoT [1] that are currently being specified to enable future 3GPP networks to support the specific requirements and use cases of the fast growing IoT markets in upcoming years. Received (April 20, 2018), Review Result (June 28, 2018), Accepted (July 2, 2018)