Coverage challenges for LoRaWAN IoT solutions

 One of the great advantages of LoRaWAN solutions is that one can avoid the rapacious charging and network lock-ins that Telcos have traditionally made an art form of. Some of us are old enough to remember paying Telcos a dollar a txt message (i.e. for a service of so little truly marginal cost to them they were often unable to calculate a txt message's cost precisely; and that eventually reduced in cost by three or four orders of magnitude or made entirely free). 

Another great advantage of LoRaWAN is that one can use existing networks where they are available (at a fair price) from a network utility and extend the network to places only you require at your time, convenience and cost. It is hard for a network utility to extend its network for a single user. Telco's are also focused on providing 5 nines quality of service while for the vast majority of IoT solutions, 2-3 nines is adequate and the marginal cost of extending this to get an extra 2-3 nines can not be economically justified.

If you have thousands, hundreds or, or possibly just tens, of devices in well-defined areas with no LoRaWAN current coverage it will often make sense for you to add in your own gateways i.e. otherwise you will pay pennies for each device each month and those pennies will add up.

There are several mechanisms for extending LoRaWAN coverage and they each have their pros and cons e.g. gateways (which will require backhaul and power); relays (which can handle a small number of devices at the edge of a network); direct to satellite solutions (which will have latency and cost constraints); Mesh gateways (which require using proprietary protocols).  We have been working with all of these and think they all have roles to play.

When looking at extending a LoRaWAN network, you need to know exactly what coverage you need i.e. to know exactly where you need coverage and what qualities of service you need (based on device populations). If you are at the edge of coverage for a mobile phone you can perhaps move a few meters to get better coverage. Things can't do this if they are fixed and don't know how to do this if they are mobile. So you need to know as well as you can the areas and places that coverage is needed at.

All the LoRaWAN solutions we create allow coverage to be collated and mapped.  We also dynamically track network congestion and outages. The areas and places which are surveyed to assess coverage are an expression of network requirements. These features allow both monitoring of current performance and predictive assessment of potential future gaps or issues e.g. we can see an area is becoming congested before that level of congestion materially affects the utility of the system. Our coverage measurement approach is network agnostic and will work with a mix of public and private gateways.

Our approach for extending LoRaWAN networks is predicated on as precise an understanding of the requirements as possible and a continuous assessment of the current state.