Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) for Smart grid: An in-depth study on LoRaWAN

Low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technologies are able to handle large-scale smart grid applications. LoRaWAN, which uses Long Range (LoRa) as its modulation technique, is one of the most promising LPWAN technologies. LoRa provides significantly long range communications. In this paper, we propose three smart grid use cases based on the LoRa technology. In these cases, LoRa not only reduces costs and need of hardware equipments but also increases safety and coverage. In addition, LoRa provides a range of parameters configurations such as spreading factor, bandwidth, coding rate, carrier frequency, and transmission power. We use these parameters to define three different configurations, namely SN1, SN2, and SN3. Next, we utilize these configurations to find out the main concerns about the use of LoRa in the context of the smart grid and to evaluate this technology in different scenarios. Our simulations demonstrate that first, in the majority of cases, LoRa is sensitive to the number of nodes;in other words, there is a negative correlation between DER and the number of the nodes. Second, in a typical experiment, by increasing the number of nodes, energy consumption of the network increases subsequently. The findings of our experiments show that LoRa network is not seriously sensitive to the distance between base stations. Finally, in a big scale application like smart lighting, interference is a crucial issue. However, we can use the directional antenna to decline the unwanted effects of interference of neighbor networks or nodes from that networks.