LoRaWAN Network Capacity for Practical Network Planning in India

LoRaWAN is a promising technology for IoT applications in the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) space and has seen rapid deployment in several parts of the world. It can also potentially serve as an alternative communication media in post-disaster scenarios when conventional networks are down. However, in such scenarios, the communication needs are much higher than in typical IoT use cases due to high density of devices and frequent exchange of large messages. Hence, it is important to conduct pre-deployment studies to understand the limitations of the network. In this paper, we present a MATLAB analysis of the number of end-devices that can be supported per LoRaWAN gateway. The dependence of gateway capacity on the length and rate of generation of new messages for different kinds of applications is shown. This paper also highlights the limitations of the hardware architecture of the currently available LoRaWAN gateway technology, which further limits the capacity of the network. Presented results demonstrate that practically achievable capacity is significantly reduced from the theoretical estimate. Upper and lower bounds on the capacity of the LoRaWAN gateway are obtained for different payloads. This analysis can be useful for network service providers and application providers in finalizing network requirements and deployment scenarios especially for post-disaster adhoc networks.