Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa
An Experimental Evaluation
Carlo Alberto Boano, Marco Cattani and Kay R
¨
omer
Institute of Technical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Keywords:
Long-range technology, Networks, PHY settings, Temperature, Reliability, RSSI, Wireless.
Abstract:
Temperature variations are known to affect the performance of wireless sensor networks deployed outdoors.
Whilst the impact of temperature on IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers has long been investigated by the research
community, still little is known about how temperature affects the performance of increasingly popular long-
range wireless technologies such as LoRa. To fill this gap, this paper presents an experimental evaluation
of the reliability of LoRa in the presence of temperature variations. First, we highlight that temperature can
have a significant impact on LoRa’s communication performance and show that an increase in temperature
can be sufficient to transform a perfect LoRa link into an almost useless one. We then carry out a detailed
investigation on the performance of different LoRa physical settings with fluctuating temperatures and show
that an optimal selection can help in increasing the probability of packet reception and is hence key to mitigate
temperature-induced effects. We believe that our results will serve as a reference to orient researchers and
system designers employing LoRa to build large-scale low-power wide area networks.
1 INTRODUCTION
Outdoor environmental conditions are known to dras-
tically affect the performance of wireless sensor net-
works (WSN). Networks deployed outdoors, indeed,
often experience a reduction of the delivery rate and
the connectivity between nodes in the presence of
fog (Anastasi et al., 2004), rain (Boano et al., 2009),
snow cover (Stoianov et al., 2007), thick vegeta-
tion (Marfievici et al., 2013), and temperature varia-
tions (Bannister et al., 2008). Especially the latter can
have a severe impact on the performance of outdoor
WSN systems (Wennerstr
¨
om et al., 2013), as they can
affect clock drift, battery capacity and discharge, as
well as radio efficiency, hence directly affecting fun-
damental aspects such as time synchronization, net-
work lifetime, and reliability of transmissions.
Most of the existing work investigating the im-
pact of temperature on low-power wireless networks
has focused on IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers. The
impact of temperature was shown to be platform-
specific (Boano et al., 2010) and to lead to se-
vere consequences on the functionality of duty-cycled
medium access control (Boano et al., 2014a) and rout-
ing (Keppitiyagama et al., 2013) protocols.
Despite the comprehensive studies carried out on
IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers, however, still little is
known about the impact of temperature on other low-
power wireless technologies, especially on the in-
creasingly popular low-rate and long-range transmis-
sion technologies used to realize low-power wide area
networks (Centenaro et al., 2016).
Long-range wireless technologies such as Sig-
fox (Sigfox, 2017), Weightless (Weightless SIG,
2017), and LoRa (LoRa Alliance, 2017) are very
promising for the realization of large-scale Internet of
Things (IoT) applications, as they allow city-wide de-
ployments and large outdoor installations in remote
areas. Among others, LoRa has been proposed to re-
alize a number of smart city applications (Kartakis
et al., 2016), outdoor parking guidance systems (KSK
Developments, 2017), as well as smart water manage-
ment infrastructures (Cattani et al., 2017b).
As a few preliminary works have shown a possi-
ble temperature-dependent performance of LoRa net-
works deployed outdoors (Iova et al., 2017), (Cattani
et al., 2017a), it is important to investigate in detail
the impact of temperature on LoRa communications
and understand how it can be possibly mitigated.
Contributions. In this paper we experimentally study
the impact of temperature on the performance of
LoRa using a temperature-controlled testbed. We first
show that temperature has a strong impact on the per-
formance of LoRa, and that an increase in temper-
Boano, C., Cattani, M. and Römer, K.
Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation.
DOI: 10.5220/0006605600390050
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2018), pages 39-50
ISBN: 978-989-758-284-4
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
39
ature similar to the daily and seasonal fluctuations
of temperature outdoors may transform a good link
(i.e., a link with high packet reception rate) into an
almost useless one (i.e., a link sustaining a packet re-
ception rate close or equal to 0). In particular, we
show that a gradual increase in temperature leads to a
higher number of corrupted and lost packets, as well
as to a progressive reduction of the received signal
strength (RSS). We show that such RSS attenuation
is platform-dependent and that it varies depending on
the distance between nodes.
We then thoroughly analyze the performance of
different LoRa’s physical layer (PHY) settings in the
presence of varying temperatures and show that an
optimal selection is key to minimize temperature-
induced effects. In particular, we show that select-
ing a lower bandwidth and a higher spreading factor,
as well as a more robust coding rate can significantly
help in maintaining a reliable communication despite
an increase of the on-board temperature.
This paper proceeds as follows. In the next sec-
tion, we introduce the reader to the increasingly pop-
ular LoRa long-range technology and to the physi-
cal layer settings that can be configured to fine-tune
the transceiver’s operations. After describing related
work in Sect. 3, we show the results of a series of
experiments conducted in a temperature-controlled
testbed in Sect. 4, highlighting how an increase in
temperature can transform a perfect link into an al-
most useless one. We then thoroughly analyze the
performance of each PHY setting in LoRa at varying
temperature in Sect. 5 and show how an optimal se-
lection can help minimizing temperature-induced ef-
fects. After elaborating on our findings in Sect. 6, we
conclude the paper and outline possible future work
in Sect. 7.
2 LoRa TECHNOLOGY
LoRa is a proprietary radio modulation technology
developed by Cycleo and acquired by Semtech in
2012 that is very promising for building wide access
networks with star topology (often referred to as low-
power wide area networks). The latter provide long-
range communication to thousands of devices at min-
imal cost and limited energy expenditure, therefore
allowing to realize large-scale urban IoT networks.
LoRa has the ability to improve the signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) at the receiver by spreading the energy of
the signal over a wider frequency band, effectively re-
ducing the spectral power density of the signal (Kar-
takis et al., 2016). The core of LoRa technology is
its chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation: the car-
rier signal of LoRa consists of chirps, signals whose
frequency increases or decreases over time (Cattani
et al., 2017a). LoRa’s chirps allow the signal to travel
distances up to several kilometers (Centenaro et al.,
2016) and to be demodulated even when its power is
up to 20 dB lower than the noise floor.
One of the key advantages of LoRa is the re-
duced complexity of networking protocols, as the
long communication range allows to form star topolo-
gies where the low-power end devices directly com-
municate with a more powerful orchestrator. This al-
lows to design asymmetric communication schemes
and to shift the load to a powerful central device,
keeping the design of end devices simple and cheap.
LoRa transceivers communicate using the sub-
GHz unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical
(ISM) bands. Among others, LoRa exploits for its
communications the 433 MHz and 868 MHz ISM
bands in Europe, and the 915 MHz ISM band in North
America. LoRa radios also allow to adjust the trans-
mission power and hence to control the energy neces-
sary to transmit a packet: common transceivers sup-
port transmission powers between -4 and +20 dBm.
Besides the selection of carrier frequency and
transmission power (supported by most low-power
transceivers used to build IoT applications), the com-
munication performance of LoRa can be fine-tuned by
varying a number of PHY settings, such as bandwidth,
spreading factor, coding rate, and carrier frequency.
Among others, these specific PHY settings allow to
trade receiver sensitivity (and hence a longer commu-
nication range and a more robust communication) for
a higher data-rate, as we describe next.
Bandwidth (BW). By varying the range of frequencies
over which LoRa’s chirps spread (i.e., by varying the
bandwidth), one can trade radio air-time against radio
sensitivity, thus choosing between a higher energy-
efficiency (lower air-time) and a higher communica-
tion range and robustness. The use of a narrow band-
width maximizes sensitivity, but increases air-time.
Increasing the bandwidth, instead, allows for faster
transmissions (and hence a lower air-time), but re-
duces sensitivity (Semtech Corporation, 2013).
Spreading Factor (SF). LoRa “spreads” each symbol
(information bits) over several chips to increase the
receiver’s sensitivity. LoRa’s spreading factor can be
selected between 6 and 12, resulting in a spreading
rate ranging from 2
6
to 2
12
chips/symbol. Please note
that LoRa modulation employs orthogonal spreading
factors. This enables multiple spread signals to be
transmitted at the same time and on the same channel
with minimal degradation of the receiver sensitivity
SENSORNETS 2018 - 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks
40
Table 1: Summary of the main configurable physical settings in LoRa and their impact on communication performance.
Setting Typical values Impact on communication performance
Bandwidth [kHz] 125 ... 500 A higher bandwidth allows to transmit packets at a higher data rate. How-
ever, a higher bandwidth also reduces the receiver sensitivity and hence the
communication range.
Spreading Factor 6 .. . 12 A high spreading factor increases the signal-to-noise ratio and hence the ra-
dio sensitivity / communication range. However, a higher spreading factor
increases the length of packets, hence causing a higher energy expenditure.
Coding Rate 4/5 .. . 4/8 A larger coding rate increases the resilience to interference bursts and de-
coding errors. However, a large coding rate implies the transmission of
longer packets and hence increases the energy expenditure.
(Semtech Corporation, 2015), i.e., packets transmit-
ted with different spreading factors appear as noise to
the target receiver.
Coding Rate (CR). LoRa makes use of forward er-
ror correction to increase the resilience to packet cor-
ruption. In particular, one can specify the number of
redundant bits, ranging from 1 to 4, where a higher
number should be used when transmitting in con-
gested radio environments (i.e., one should select a
higher coding rate to maximize the probability of suc-
cessful packet reception). Transceivers operating with
different coding rates can still communicate to each
other, since the packet header (transmitted using the
maximum coding rate of 4/8) includes the code rate
used for the payload.
Table 1 summarizes the typical values and the
impact of each PHY setting on data rate, re-
ceiver sensitivity, communication range, and energy-
efficiency (Semtech Corporation, 2015).
3 RELATED WORK
The impact of temperature on the performance of
wireless sensor networks has been largely analyzed
by the research community, especially in the context
of IEEE 802.15.4 radios. After showing the correla-
tion between temperature and received signal strength
(RSS) in a deployment in the Sonoran desert, Bannis-
ter et al. have confirmed in a temperature-controlled
chamber that the RSS of the TI CC2420 radio atten-
uates at high temperatures. The authors have further
identified that such RSS attenuation is due to the im-
pact of temperature on the CC2420 transceiver’s low-
noise and power amplifiers (Bannister et al., 2008).
Based upon this work, a number of researchers
have confirmed that these findings also apply in a sim-
ilar way to other IEEE 802.15.4 platforms such as the
TI CC1020 and CC2520 (Boano et al., 2010), and
have highlighted how diurnal and seasonal temper-
ature variations can cause a complete disruption of
an IEEE 802.15.4 link (Boano et al., 2013). Wen-
nerstr
¨
om et al. have also presented results from a
long-term outdoor deployment of TelosB nodes and
have shown that packet reception ratio and RSS are
highly correlated with temperature, whereas their cor-
relation with other factors such as absolute humid-
ity and precipitation is less pronounced (Wennerstr
¨
om
et al., 2013). Other authors have also shown how
the impact of temperature variations on low-power
radio transceivers may strongly affect the operations
of duty-cycled medium access control (Boano et al.,
2014a), (Oppermann et al., 2015), as well as routing
protocols (Keppitiyagama et al., 2013).
The impact of environmental conditions on long-
range radios, instead, has not yet been investigated in
detail. In previous work (Cattani et al., 2017a) we
have reported that one can observe a certain correla-
tion between temperature fluctuations and variations
in packet reception rate and received signal strength in
outdoor and underground LoRa deployments. How-
ever, we did not study the problem in depth and we
did not investigate the impact of temperature on com-
munication when using different LoRa PHY settings.
Iova et al. (Iova et al., 2017) have deployed a num-
ber of LoRa networks in urban and mountain environ-
ments, and reported that environmental factors such
as the presence of vegetation and temperature vari-
ations can negatively affect communication perfor-
mance. The authors, however, did not quantify the
impact of these environmental factors (especially the
one of temperature) in detail.
The remaining body of work on LoRa has
focused primarily on the characterization of
packet loss (Marcelis et al., 2017), signal atten-
uation (Pet
¨
aj
¨
aj
¨
arvi et al., 2015), sensitivity (Augustin
et al., 2016), channel utilization (Georgiou and Raza,
Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation
41
0
20
40
60
80
100
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
%
Rec. correctly Rec. corrupted Lost
0
20
40
60
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Temp. [°C]
Time [min]
(a) Link 0–1 (SF = 7)
0
20
40
60
80
100
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
%
Rec. correctly Rec. corrupted Lost
0
20
40
60
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Temp. [°C]
Time [min]
(b) Link 0–2 (SF = 12)
Figure 1: Disruption of two LoRa links caused by an increase of the on-board temperature. A very good link (i.e., sustaining
almost 100% successful receptions) at low temperature experiences an increasing corruption and loss as soon as temperature
increases, up to a point in which the link becomes unusable. The two links make use of spreading factor 7 and 12, respectively.
2017), (Voigt et al., 2017), and energy consump-
tion (Bor and Roedig, 2017). Other works have also
studied the ability of LoRa to penetrate buildings (Bor
et al., 2016a) and to receive packets from concurrent
transmissions (Bor et al., 2016b).
In this paper, we specifically study the impact of
temperature on LoRa’s communication performance
and answer two key questions: (i) how severe is such
an impact, and (ii) whether it can be minimized with a
proper selection of PHY settings. Towards this goal,
we carry out several experiments in a temperature-
controlled testbed and analyze the communication
performance of LoRa links using different PHY set-
tings, as we describe in the next sections.
4 IMPACT OF TEMPERATURE
ON LORA COMMUNICATIONS
We first study whether variations in temperature can
lead to a significant packet loss or a visible RSS at-
tenuation, similar to the one shown in the literature
for IEEE 802.15.4 radios. Towards this goal, we make
use of an experimental setup where the temperature of
several nodes can be controlled in a fine-grained fash-
ion (Sect. 4.1), and analyze the evolution of packet
reception rate (Sect. 4.2) and RSS (Sect. 4.3).
4.1 Experimental Setup
We make use of TempLab (Boano et al., 2014b), a
temperature-controlled testbed, to expose a number
of LoRa nodes to repeatable temperature variations
1
.
1
Please note that the temperature variations to which
LoRa transceivers are exposed when using TempLab
are within the supported temperature range of LoRa
Infra-red heating lamps and enclosures are distributed
across a 50m
2
area and can be controlled wirelessly.
We build a star network of LoRa nodes composed
of a sink (node 0) periodically broadcasting messages
with 5 bytes payload to four nodes (1 to 4). Two
of the nodes (1 and 2) are at the edge of their com-
munication range (signal strength of received pack-
ets close to -100 dBm), whereas the remaining nodes
(3 and 4) are located closer to the sink and hence re-
ceive packets with a higher signal strength. All nodes
are based on the Moteino MEGA platform (LowPow-
erLab, 2016) that embeds a HopeRF RFM95 LoRa
transceiver (Hope RF Microelectronics, 2017). We
employ the highest transmission power available (+5
dBm), a coding rate of 4/5, a bandwidth of 125 kHz
and a spreading factor of 7 or 12.
All nodes measure temperature using a Bosch
BME280 sensor and log this information via USB on
a central testbed PC, along with the content of the re-
ceived messages, the results of the cyclic redundancy
check, the received signal strength, and the SNR. De-
pending on the employed spreading factor, the sink
transmits messages at 0.5 or 2 Hz (SF=12 or SF=7,
respectively). We do not make use of any radio duty
cycling and initially do not connect an SMA antenna
to the nodes in order to limit their range. We have
later repeated some of the experiments with an SMA
antenna or cable and obtained similar results.
4.2 Impact on Packet Reception
In a first experiment, we focus on the two receivers
that are located at a distance from the sink that is close
to the edge of their communication range, but that still
guarantees a high packet reception rate (i.e., nodes 1
transceivers, i.e., between -55 and +115
C for the Hop-
eRFM95 and the Semtech SX1272 transceivers.
SENSORNETS 2018 - 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks
42
-64
-63
-62
-61
-60
-59
-58
0 10 20 30 40 50
RSSI [dBm]
Temperature [°C]
Fitting line: f(x)=-0.073x -58.7 (r
2
=+0.94)
RSSI value
(a) Node 3 (SF = 7)
-86
-85
-84
-83
-82
-81
-80
-79
-78
0 10 20 30 40 50
RSSI [dBm]
Temperature [°C]
Fitting line: f(x)=-0.090x -79.7 (r
2
=+0.95)
RSSI value
(b) Node 4 (SF = 7)
Figure 2: RSSI attenuation as a function of temperature on the Moteino MEGA employing a HopeRF RFM95 transceiver.
and 2). We then instruct the temperature-controlled
testbed to slowly increase the temperature of the sink
node and to then quickly cool down its temperature to
the initial value. We repeat the test multiple times and
make use of different temperature profiles.
Link Disruption. Fig. 1 shows the distribution of
lost, corrupted, and successfully received packets
over time for the two different links. In both cases, we
can observe that what was a perfect link at low tem-
peratures, i.e., a link sustaining a 100% packet recep-
tion rate (PRR), slowly becomes unusable at higher
temperatures. An increase in temperature at the trans-
mitter, indeed, causes node 1 to experience a signif-
icant corruption and loss (Fig. 1(a)), up to a point at
which the link becomes unusable when the transmit-
ter’s on-board temperature is higher than 55
C. Simi-
larly, also node 2 does not receive any packet at high
temperatures (Fig. 1(b)): what was an almost perfect
link at 0
C becomes unusable when the transmitter’s
on-board temperature is higher than 55
C.
It is worth highlighting that the two links shown in
Fig. 1 exhibit a visibly different amount of corruption
and react to temperature variations differently. In-
deed, link 0–2 experiences more corruption than its
counterpart, and its transitional region (i.e., the re-
gion in which the nodes do not communicate reli-
ably (Z
´
u
˜
niga and Krishnamachari, 2004)) covers ap-
proximately a temperature variation of 60
C, whereas
the latter is 30
C for link 0–1. As the two links make
use of largely different spreading factors (SF=7 for
link 0–1, whilst SF=12 for link 0–2), our results seem
to hint that the behavior of LoRa links exposed to tem-
perature variations depends on the PHY settings used.
4.3 Impact on Received Signal Strength
In a second experiment, we focus on the two Moteino
MEGA that are located in closer proximity to the
sink (i.e., nodes 3 and 4), configure them with identi-
cal settings (i.e., CR=4/5, BW=125 kHz, and SF=7),
-54
-52
-50
-48
0 10 20 30 40 50
RSSI [dBm]
Temperature [°C]
Fitting line: f(x)=-0.111x -48.2 (r
2
=+0.93)
RSSI value
Figure 3: RSSI attenuation as a function of temperature
recorded on ST Microelectronics Nucleo L073RZ platform
employing a Semtech SX1272 transceiver.
and study the evolution of received signal strength
while temperature increases. We instruct the testbed
to slowly increase the on-board temperature of all
nodes in the range between 0 and 50
C during five
hours. We then plot the relationship between the RSS
of received packets and the average temperature of the
communicating nodes. Fig. 2 shows the results.
RSS Attenuation at High Temperatures. A first
observation is that the received signal strength on
a Moteino MEGA board (HopeRF RFM95 radio)
exhibits an attenuation at high temperatures simi-
lar to the linear trend observed on IEEE 802.15.4
transceivers (Boano et al., 2013). Both nodes 3 and
4 exhibit indeed a linear decrease of the RSS in dis-
crete steps for a total of about 3-4 dB in the temper-
ature range of [0 50]
C. Bannister et al. argue that
the reason for this attenuation in the TI CC2420 radio
is due to the fact that, for a given voltage, a higher
temperature increases the resistance of conductors,
while reducing the pass-through current. For radio
transceivers, this implies that higher temperatures re-
duce the received signal strength and SNR (Bannister
et al., 2008). We conjecture that LoRa transceivers
are affected in a similar way.
Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation
43
Table 2: PHY settings used in our experiments ordered by decreasing bit-rate.
Setting ID 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
SF 7 7 7 7 7 7 9 9 9 9 9 9 12 12 12 12 12 12
CR 4/5 4/5 4/5 4/8 4/8 4/8 4/5 4/5 4/5 4/8 4/8 4/8 4/5 4/5 4/5 4/8 4/8 4/8
BW (kHz) 125 250 500 125 250 500 125 250 500 125 250 500 125 250 500 125 250 500
RSS Attenuation Varies at Different Distances.
Another observation from our results is that the fit-
ting line shown in Fig. 2(a), interpolating the received
RSS values of node 3 (whose RSS is about -60 dBm),
has a smaller slope than the one shown in Fig. 2(b)
for node 4 (whose RSS is in the area of -80 dBm).
This hints that the impact of temperature is specific
to each node and may depend on the distance to the
transmitter.
Platform-specific Attenuation. We further investi-
gate the RSS attenuation using a different LoRa plat-
form. We employ the same experimental setup de-
scribed in Sect. 4.1 and expose ST Nucleo L073RZ
boards (ST Microelectronics, 2016) equipped with a
Semtech SX1272 radio (Semtech Corporation, 2017)
to the same change in temperature. We employ
the same settings described previously, i.e., CR=4/5,
SF=7, BW=125 kHz. Fig. 3 shows the relationship
between RSS and temperature: also in this case we
can observe a linear decrease of RSS in discrete steps
by a total of about 5-6 dB in the temperature range
of [0 50]
C. The absolute decrease is higher than
that observed on the Moteino MEGA nodes, which
hints that the RSS attenuation – as for IEEE 802.15.4
transceivers – may be platform-specific.
5 THE ROLE OF PHY SETTINGS
Next, we explore whether changing LoRa’s PHY set-
tings helps in minimizing the impact of temperature
on the reliability of communications. In our cur-
rent investigation, we specifically focus on the role
of bandwidth, spreading factor, and coding rate.
5.1 Explored Settings
We create an application that periodically reboots all
nodes and switches to a different combination of PHY
settings over time. Using the time-stamp provided by
a Maxim DS3231 real-time clock, we reboot transmit-
ter and receivers every 6 minutes and iterate over a list
of 18 hard-coded combinations of bandwidth, spread-
ing factor, and coding rate, as summarized in Table 2.
Please note that the settings are ordered by decreasing
bit-rate (i.e., setting ID 21 is the slowest one) and that
they have been selected to enable an easy comparison
with earlier works studying LoRa’s performance as a
function of its PHY settings (Cattani et al., 2017a).
We first let the temperature-controlled testbed heat
transmitter and receiver nodes to 30
C a tempera-
ture that we use as a baseline. After running each
combination of PHY settings at least three times,
hence allowing the transmitter to broadcast about
5000 packets, we let the testbed vary the tempera-
ture of the transmitter and the receiver to 70
C and
re-iterate over the 18 combinations of settings. In
order to study whether an increase in temperature at
the transmitter or at the receiver affects performance
differently, we let the testbed heat to 70
C first only
the transmitting node, then only the receivers (while
keeping the transmitter at the 30
C baseline), and then
both transmitter and receivers.
The rest of the experimental setup is the same as
described in Sect. 4.1, with each Moteino MEGA log-
ging via USB all statistics about packet reception,
RSS, and SNR to the main testbed PC. We analyze
the impact of temperature on PRR and RSS/SNR as
a function of the employed PHY settings, describing
our findings in Sect. 5.2 and 5.3, respectively.
5.2 Packet Reception
Figs. 4 and 5 summarize the impact of bandwidth,
spreading factor and coding rate on the packet re-
ception of nodes 2 and 1, respectively. For each
combination of PHY settings, four bars depict the
packet reception when none of the nodes was heated
(None), when only the transmitter (TX), only the re-
ceiver (RX), or when both transmitter and receiver
(TX+RX) were heated. The green portion of each bar
shows the ratio (in percent) of packets that have been
received correctly; the black and red portions of each
bar, instead, indicate the percentage of corrupted and
lost packets, respectively. Independent from the qual-
ity of the two links, we note four consistent effects
that LoRa’s PHY settings have on packet reception.
1. Impact of heated device(s). When both trans-
mitter and receivers are at our baseline temperature
(None-labeled bars), the amount of packets received
correctly is the highest. As soon as we increase the
temperature of the transmitter (TX bars), the percent-
ages of corrupted and lost packets increase (black
and red areas). The effect worsens if the receiver
SENSORNETS 2018 - 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks
44
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 16) (Setting 17) (Setting 18)
%
Lost Rec. corrupted Rec. correctly
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 10) (Setting 11) (Setting 12)
%
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 4) (Setting 5) (Setting 6)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
%
(a) Coding Rate = 4/5
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 19) (Setting 20) (Setting 21)
%
Lost Rec. corrupted Rec. correctly
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 13) (Setting 14) (Setting 15)
%
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 7) (Setting 8) (Setting 9)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
%
(b) Coding Rate = 4/8
Figure 4: Number of packets that are lost, corrupted, and received correctly by node 2 when employing different PHY settings.
For each combination of PHY settings, four bars depict the packet reception when none of the nodes was heated (None), when
only the transmitter (TX), only the receiver (RX), or when both transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated.
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 16) (Setting 17) (Setting 18)
%
Lost Rec. corrupted Rec. correctly
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 10) (Setting 11) (Setting 12)
%
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 4) (Setting 5) (Setting 6)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
%
(a) Coding Rate = 4/5
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 19) (Setting 20) (Setting 21)
%
Lost Rec. corrupted Rec. correctly
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 13) (Setting 14) (Setting 15)
%
0
25
50
75
100
(Setting 7) (Setting 8) (Setting 9)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
%
(b) Coding Rate = 4/8
Figure 5: Number of packets that are lost, corrupted, and received correctly by node 1 when employing different PHY settings.
For each combination of PHY settings, four bars depict the packet reception when none of the nodes was heated (None), when
only the transmitter (TX), only the receiver (RX), or when both transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated.
is heated instead of the transmitter (RX bars) and
when both receiver and transmitter are heated simul-
taneously (TX+RX bars). While this effect is coher-
ent with the observations made in previous work on
IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers (Boano et al., 2013), we
cannot explain the reason why heating the receiver
has a higher impact compared to the case in which
only the transmitter is heated. We plan to further an-
alyze this aspect in future work. Nevertheless, inde-
pendent from the selected PHY setting, we note a con-
sistent degradation of the link quality whenever one or
more devices are heated.
2. Bandwidth. In the presence of message loss due to
heat, it is possible to improve the reliability of LoRa
links by lowering the bandwidth (left region of the x-
axis in Figs. 4 and 5). Whilst it is expected that a
lower bandwidth results in a more robust communi-
cation, we are to the best of our knowledge the
first to show that such robustness extends also to the
effects of temperature.
3. Coding rate. Using an higher coding rate allows
to recover corrupted packets and to increase the suc-
cess ratio. We can see this phenomenon by comparing
Figs. 4(a) and 5(a) against Figs. 4(b) and 5(b). The
former make use of less redundant bits and thus expe-
rience a higher corruption (areas in black). In spite of
that, we notice that only in a few cases, when nodes
experience heterogeneous temperatures, the number
of corrupted packets is high enough to justify the use
of an higher coding rate.
4. Spreading factor. Using a lower spreading fac-
tor drastically reduces the reliability of LoRa links at
high temperatures. A higher spreading factor, indeed,
increases the receiver sensitivity (i.e., the radio’s abil-
ity to receive weaker signals) at the cost of longer
transmission times. Figs. 4 and 5 show that a LoRa
link that cannot sustain a reliable packet delivery rate
when using a spreading factor of 7 (i.e., a spreading
rate of 2
7
=128).
Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation
45
5.3 RSS and SNR
Figs. 6, 7, and 8 show the impact of temperature on
the received signal strength and signal-to-noise ra-
tio measured at receiving nodes 2 and 3. As for the
previous experiment, for each combination of PHY
settings, four bars depict the packet reception when
none of the nodes was heated (None), when only the
transmitter (TX), only the receiver (RX), or when both
transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated. Inde-
pendent from the receiving node and the quality of
its connection with the transmitter, we note four con-
sistent effects that LoRa’s PHY settings have on the
received signal strength and the SNR.
1. Impact of heated device(s). Consistent to what
we observed for the PRR, the RSS decreases with the
number of heated devices, with the worst effect being
recorded when both transmitter and receiver nodes are
heated (see Fig. 6). This is however not the case when
nodes receive packets with a signal strength that is
very close to the sensitivity threshold ( -100 dBm).
This is indeed the case for node 2, which is at the
edge of its communication range (see Fig. 7). Also
the measured signal-to-noise ratio exhibits a trend that
is temperature-dependent, with the lowest SNR being
recorded when both transmitter and receiver nodes are
heated (see Fig. 8).
2. Temperature-independent variations. Whilst we
can clearly notice that the measured RSS and SNR
values vary depending on the temperatures of the
transmitter and receiver, we can observe that changes
in RSS and SNR occur also when varying bandwidth,
spreading factor, and coding rate, independently of
the nodes’ temperature.
Bandwidth. We note that the absolute RSS value,
measured in dBm at the transceiver after the recep-
tion of a packet, changes depending on the employed
LoRa setting. In particular, increasing the bandwidth
results in higher measured RSS. In the case of node 2,
this is because at higher bandwidths LoRa sensitivity
worsens, allowing only the packets with high signal
strength to be received (see Fig. 4 and 7). On the
contrary, at higher bandwidths we observe the SNR
decreasing (see Fig. 8), indicating that LoRa is more
sensitive to noise when higher bandwidths are used.
Spreading factor. A higher spreading factor increases
the receiver sensitivity and hence the reliability of
LoRa communications at high temperatures. The in-
creased sensitivity when using a higher spreading fac-
tor can be confirmed by comparing Figs. 6 and 7
against Fig. 8. We can observe that, whilst there is
no significant difference in SNR when using differ-
ent spreading factors, the RSS decreases significantly
when using a SF of 9 or 12, hinting that the sensitivity
of the radio increases proportionally.
Coding rate. By comparing Figs. 6(a) and 7(a) against
Figs. 6(b) and 7(b), we can observe that a higher cod-
ing rate results in higher measured RSS. A higher
coding rate also results in a slightly lower SNR (ap-
proximately 0.7 dB lower), regardless of temperature
variations. A more thorough analysis of these phe-
nomena is out of the scope of this paper and will be
carried out in future work.
6 DISCUSSION
The experimental results described in Sects. 4 and 5
show that the effects of temperature on LoRa’s packet
delivery can be quite severe, in line with earlier stud-
ies carried out on IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers (Bannis-
ter et al., 2008), (Boano et al., 2013), (Wennerstr
¨
om
et al., 2013). We derive next a number of insights
and recommendations for developers and network en-
gineers that may be useful to minimize the impact of
temperature on LoRa communication performance.
Monitor Temperature Variations. Having know-
ledge about the evolution of the on-board tempera-
ture at run-time is important to be able to understand
whether a decrease in RSS is due to heat or to other
environmental effects such as multi-path fading or in-
terference. Furthermore, as our experiments show
that the impact of temperature is platform and node-
specific, each node needs to derive its own strategy to
mitigate the effects of temperature.
Adapt PHY Settings Accordingly. A thorough un-
derstanding of the evolution of the on-board tem-
perature also allows to predict trends and, if neces-
sary, proactively switch PHY settings to increase the
chances of packet reception. In case temperature in-
creases to a point at which it starts affecting commu-
nication performance, one should, if possible, switch
to a lower bandwidth, a higher spreading factor, as
well as a higher coding rate.
Do not Always Prefer Faster PHY Settings. Ear-
lier studies have shown that selecting the fastest PHY
settings and the highest transmission power where
possible is more efficient than selecting slower set-
tings that maximize the link quality (Cattani et al.,
2017a). Our results in Sect. 5, however, highlight that
selecting a higher bandwidth and lower spreading fac-
tor makes the LoRa nodes less robust to temperature
variations. When selecting PHY settings that mini-
mize the air time and the radio’s energy expenditure,
one should hence carefully monitor fluctuations of the
SENSORNETS 2018 - 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks
46
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 16) (Setting 17) (Setting 18)
RSSI [dBm]
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 10) (Setting 11) (Setting 12)
RSSI [dBm]
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 4) (Setting 5) (Setting 6)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
RSSI [dBm]
(a) Coding Rate = 4/5
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 19) (Setting 20) (Setting 21)
RSSI [dBm]
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 13) (Setting 14) (Setting 15)
RSSI [dBm]
-86
-84
-82
-80
(Setting 7) (Setting 8) (Setting 9)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
RSSI [dBm]
(b) Coding Rate = 4/8
Figure 6: RSS measured on node 3 when using different PHY settings. For each combination of PHY settings, four bars
depict the packet reception when none of the nodes was heated (None), when only the transmitter (TX), only the receiver
(RX), or when both transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated.
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 16) (Setting 17) (Setting 18)
RSSI [dBm]
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 10) (Setting 11) (Setting 12)
RSSI [dBm]
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 4) (Setting 5) (Setting 6)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
RSSI [dBm]
(a) Coding Rate = 4/5
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 19) (Setting 20) (Setting 21)
RSSI [dBm]
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 13) (Setting 14) (Setting 15)
RSSI [dBm]
-105
-102
-99
-96
(Setting 7) (Setting 8) (Setting 9)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
Heat: None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX None TX RX TX+RX
RSSI [dBm]
(b) Coding Rate = 4/8
Figure 7: RSS measured on node 2 when using different PHY settings. For each combination of PHY settings, four bars
depict the packet reception when none of the nodes was heated (None), when only the transmitter (TX), only the receiver
(RX), or when both transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated.
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 16) (Setting 17) (Setting 18)
SNR [dB]
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 10) (Setting 11) (Setting 12)
SNR [dB]
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 4) (Setting 5) (Setting 6)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
SNR [dB]
(a) Coding Rate = 4/5
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 19) (Setting 20) (Setting 21)
SNR [dB]
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 13) (Setting 14) (Setting 15)
SNR [dB]
-24
-18
-12
-6
(Setting 7) (Setting 8) (Setting 9)
125 250 500
Bandwidth
Spreading Rate
128 512 4096
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
Heat: None TX+RX None TX+RX None TX+RX
SNR [dB]
(b) Coding Rate = 4/8
Figure 8: SNR measured on node 2 when using different PHY settings. For each combination of PHY settings, four bars
depict the packet reception when none of the nodes was heated (None), when only the transmitter (TX), only the receiver
(RX), or when both transmitter and receiver (TX+RX) were heated.
on-board temperature and make sure that these do not
affect communication performance. If, despite the se-
lection of a lower bandwidth and a higher spreading
factor (and coding rate), communication performance
is still insufficient, one can only resort to a higher
transmission power, where applicable.
Careful Deployment of Nodes. An important take-
away message from our experimental study is that
LoRa nodes employing the radio transceivers used
in our experiments (i.e., the Semtech SX1272 and
the HopeRF RFM95 transceivers) should be deployed
during the warmest time of the day or year, to en-
Impact of Temperature Variations on the Reliability of LoRa - An Experimental Evaluation
47
sure that network performance is sufficient through-
out the system lifetime despite temperature varia-
tions. Deployments of wireless sensor networks have
indeed observed that on-board temperature fluctua-
tions across different times of the year can be as high
as 85
C (Wennerstr
¨
om et al., 2013), (Beutel et al.,
2009), (Boano, 2014).
Avoid Sun Exposure. When deploying a network,
one should also pay attention to shield nodes from
sunlight as much as possible. Especially the orches-
trator should be shielded from sunlight as, in a star
network, an increase of its temperature would affect
all other nodes (see Fig. 1). Sunshine may indeed
easily heat a packaged sensor node up to 70
C espe-
cially if the enclosure absorbs infra-red radiation (Po-
lastre et al., 2004), (Szewczyk et al., 2004). Further-
more, airtight and waterproof enclosures may protect
the node from corrosion, humidity and atmospheric
contaminants (Barrenetxea et al., 2008), (Beutel et al.,
2009), but may also increase the temperature of the in-
ner casing (Boano et al., 2009), (Polastre et al., 2004).
7 CONCLUSIONS
Large temperature fluctuations are typical of outdoor
scenarios where most low-power wide-area networks
are deployed. Hence, it is important to understand the
impact of temperature on the performance of long-
range wireless technologies.
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of
the reliability of LoRa in the presence of tempera-
ture variations. First, using a temperature-controlled
testbed we have shown that an increase in tempera-
ture can be sufficient to transform a perfect LoRa link
into an almost useless one. Second, we carried out a
detailed investigation on the performance of different
LoRa’s PHY settings with fluctuating temperatures
and shown that an accurate selection helps in increas-
ing the probability of packet reception and is hence
key to mitigate temperature-induced effects. Finally,
we distilled a list of recommendations to help the suc-
cessful deployment of low-power wide-area networks
in outdoor scenarios.
Future work includes a more detailed investiga-
tion of the problem on a hardware-level, in order to
suggest an improved transceiver layout.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the anonymous re-
viewers for their thorough and valuable feedback.
This work has been supported by the Sino-Austrian
Electronic Technology Innovation Center and was
partially performed within the LEAD-Project “De-
pendable Internet of Things in Adverse Environ-
ments”, funded by Graz University of Technology
(Graz, Austria).
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