An Evaluation of LoRa Communication Range in Urban and Forest Areas: A Case Study in Brazil and Portugal

Due to its particular features, LoRa is gaining more and more attention from industry and academia because it tries to combine long communication range, low-power consumption, and low-data rate application. A very important feature observed on LoRa is that it is highly robust and reliable. Due to this, LoRa is being applied in many IoT solutions in urban environment, but on hard natural environments like dense forest, near river sides, lakes and mangroves, more studies need to be carried out in order to evaluate the its quality. This paper describes experimental studies carried out to measure LoRa communication range and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), both in natural and urban environments. The experiments took place in two different places of the world, one in the northern hemisphere and another in the southern hemisphere: on the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores (in SãoMiguel Island) and in the city of João Pessoa in Northeast of Brazil, respectively. As a result, we observed that LoRa is very robust in dense urban environments, where it was possible to established long distance connections (approximately 2.1 km). However, the results were inconclusive in forest environments, because in the Azores, the LoRa connection ranged about 800 m thought the forest/lake, while in Brazil it was about 230 m.