Evaluation of the IoT LoRaWAN Solution for Distributed Measurement Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is based on data collection, where billions of sensors sample the real world; in other words, the IoT includes a giant distributed measurement system (DMS). A question still requiring an answer is: Are the IoT technologies usable to enhance traditional measurement systems, since they have been developed for a very similar objective? In this paper, the use of a long-range (LoRa) technology, originally developed for IoT, is investigated with the aim of implementing DMSs. After the conclusion that LoRa and LoRa wide area network architectures show a good match with measurement systems, this paper focuses on the characterization of time-related performance indicators that are important for distributed systems. The experimental results show the capability of low-cost transceiver to schedule the transmission of frames with a standard uncertainty less than 3 μs; and an acceptable longterm clock stability (Allan Deviation) of commercial available devices (nodes and packet forwarders) for application such as smart metering, smart building, and process industry.