Implementation of LoRa End-Device in Sensor Network System
for Indoor Application
2020 IEEE International Conference on Communication, Networks and Satellite (Comnetsat) | 978-0-7381-2517-6/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/Comnetsat50391.2020.9329003
Raihan Zaky Thamrin, Octarina Nur Samijayani, Suci Rahmatia
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Al Azhar Indonesia
Jakarta, Indonesia
thamrin905@gmail.com, octarina.nur@uai.ac.id, suci@uai.ac.id
Abstract — In LoRa network architecture, the End Device
functions as a node that is connected to sensors and other
interfaces which then transmit data to the gateway, and to be
forwarded to the Network Server. This paper implement LoRa
on a sensor network, considering its several advantages, has long
range distance up to 1 km, low energy consumption, and data
received in json format string. The experiment is conducted to
test the performance of single LoRa End Device in transmitting
the data sensor to the monitoring center. The testing is done in
indoor, with 3 meter distance between end device node and
gateway. The Antares.id application is used as a dashboard for
data presentation. The test is done using two different type of
data string. The size of data memory depends on the number of
data strings sent. The more number of data strings sent will
increase the capacity of data and increasing power consumption.
Data from sensor is successfully sent by LoRa transceiver to the
gateway, although there is a data transmission error of about
14,9%. Some parameters that can be adjusted to improve the
system performance include the channel frequency, number of
data string bits, and also interval time of data transmission,
which can be adjusted following to the characteristics of the
sensing parameters.
Keywords— End Device, LoRa, Antares.id, Performance.
I. INTRODUCTION
Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that allows
devices or everything around us connected to the internet. Any
device that exists, also the surrounding environment can be
monitored and accessed by users via the internet, wherever
and whenever users can monitor environmental conditions and
even control them remotely via the internet. This monitoring
and the controlling system can be implemented in housing,
industry, farming, urban buildings, and disaster prevention
application.
The development of the internet of things or IoT is
currently very rapid. From its implementation, IoT is used to
monitor, control, and connect the devices with the internet.
One IoT application is the smart home, where all devices at
home such as lights, televisions, air conditioners, and also
home monitoring equipment are connected. The device is
connected to the user so that the user can supervise and
control the device remotely. In the industrial sector, machines
and products are monitored remotely by the operators. Also in
plantations, its environmental conditions can be monitored and
can be optimized automatically from a distance.
IoT may utilize various technologies such as WiFi,
Bluetooth, Zigbee, GSM, and the latest wireless
communication technology called LoRa. There are several
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Daniel Adrianto, I Ketut Agung Enriko
Media and Digital Departement
PT Telkom Indonesia Tbk
Bandung, Indonesia
876984@telkom.co.id, enrico@tekom.co.id
challenges in IoT implementation including the connectivity,
communication range, and also power consumption. LoRa is a
new communication technology with long-range and low
power consumption. Based on IEEE 802.15.4.
LoRa technology can be implemented in many network
architecture. An architecture of a LoRa end device that
functioned as a node and connected to a gateway which then
the data is forwarded to a network server is LoRaWAN
network architecture. In purpose of monitor using IoT system,
the application of LoRaWAN can be implemented in indoor
area. The network performance may have its own
characteristics when it get implemented. This experiment is
conducted in purpose to identify the characteristics of
LoRaWAN in indoor implementation.
II. .BASIC THEORY
A. Internet of Things
The IoT concept was created by members of the Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID) development community in
1999. Today, the development of IoT has greatly increased
driven by the growth of mobile devices, communication that is
increasingly easy to do, cloud computing, and analytic data.
The purpose of the Internet of Things is to enable things to
always be connected anytime, anywhere with anything and
anyone ideal using any network and service. [1] Internet of
Things refers to the use of devices and connected systems to
utilize data obtained from sensors, actuators embedded in
machines, or other physical objects. For consumers, IoT has
the potential to provide solutions that can improve energy
efficiency, security, health, education, and other aspects of
daily life. As for companies, IoT can support solutions that
improve decision making and productivity in manufacturing,
retail, agriculture, and other sectors.
Internet of Things is a world where various objects can
feel, communicate, and share information that is connected
through public or private Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
These interconnected objects have data that is collected,
analyzed, then used to be able to initiate an action, provide a
wealth of intelligence for planning, management, and decision
making. The vision of the Internet of Things is a concept and
paradigm that considers the existence of the internet in an
environment that can connect objects with objects through
wired and wireless connections to interact with each other in
terms of achieving common goals. The Internet of Things is
defined into three categories, namely person to person, person
to machine/object, object/machine to object/machine, all of
which interact with the internet.
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B. LoRa
LoRa, which stands for "Long Range", is a long-distance
wireless communication system, promoted by the LoRa TABLE 1. Summarize of configurable settings of LoRa End Device
Alliance. This system aims to be used in durable battery-
Setting Values Effect
powered devices, where energy consumption is very important
[1]. The typical LoRa network is the "star topology", which Bandwidth 125-500kHz The higher bandwidth allows
includes three different types of devices, as shown in Figure 1 the transmission of packets at
higher data rates (1 kHz = 1
kcps), but reduce receiver
sensitivity and
communication range.
Spreading 27.- 212 A larger spread factor can
Factor increase the signal-to-noise
ratio and radio sensitivity,
increase the communication
range and hence the higher
energy expenditure.
Coding 4/5 - 4/8 Larger coding rates increase
Rate the resilience to interference
bursts.
Transmissi -4 - 20dBm Higher transmission powers
on Power increase the signal-to-noise
ratio.

FIGURE 1. Topology of LoRa [2]

III. RESEARCH METHOD
Several components of the network are defined and are
required to form a LoRaWAN network: end-devices, The architecture circuit design consists of hardware circuit
gateways, and the network server [2]. design and software configuration. The hardware component is
- End-device: low-power consumption sensors that utilizing the Arduino Uno as the microcontroller, one ambience
communicate with gateways using LoRa. sensor as data input, and LoRa radio module as a data
transmitter device. The data transmitted will be received by the
- Gateway: the intermediate devices that forward packets
nearest Gateway [4]. The experiment is conducted to test the
coming from end-devices to a network server over an IP performance of LoRa, as an End Device, in indoor application,
backhaul interface allowing a bigger throughput. and it uses the LUX sensor to sense the light intensity in one
- Network server: responsible for decoding the packets sent room. Software configuration is performed on the
by the devices and generating the packets that should be microcontroller programming and defining the address to
sent back to the devices. which data is sent. In addition, channel frequency adjustments
are also made so that the data can be received precisely.
LoRa has a configurable setting which will affect the
communication performance. These configurations involve the
Bandwidth, Spread Factor, Coding Rate, and Transmission
Power. The bandwidth of LoRa is between 125 kHz to 500
kHz. Higher bandwidth provides higher data rates, but reduce
sensitivity and communication range. The spreading factor of
LoRa is between 7 to 12, which leads to 128 to 4096
chips/symbols and the coding rate is 4/5 to 4/8. A larger
coding rate provides increasing resilience to interference
bursts and decoding errors at the cost of longer packets and
higher energy expenditure. The transmission power of LoRa is
in a range between -4 dBm to 20 dBm. Higher transmission
power reduces the signal-to-noise ratio at the cost of an
increase in the energy consumption of the transmitter.[3]
TABLE 1 describes the configurable settings of LoRa End
Device.

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FIGURE 2. End Device circuit and hardware component
The circuit of the end device is contain three main parts, the
Arduino microcontroller, the ambience sensor (GY-302) as
data input, and the LoRa radio module (rfm95w) as
transceiver. The data flow in single direction, start from the
sensor for generate signal input next to microcontroller for the
processing and proceed to the radio module to be sent to the
gateway. The connection between GY-203 sensor and
Arduino microcontroller is using I2C. the microprocessor and
the radio module is connected by serial communication. The
data will be sent by the radio module to the gateway using the
rp-sma antenna type.
FIGURE 3. Software Channel Configuration
Guard bandwidth that configured in this research is
200kHz, because with this range, the channel can be made up
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to 8 channel. 200kHz bandwidth is quite larger than 125kHz
for gap between channel to avoid wave interference.[5]
Frequency setting configuration is done by programming
microcontroller Library shown in Figure 3. The channel that
used in this research are shown in TABLE 2. Below:
TABLE 2. End Device Channel
Channel Frequency
0 921.1 MHz
1 921.3 MHz
2 921.5 MHz
3 921.7 MHz
4 921.9 MHz
5 922.1 MHz
6 922.3 MHz
7 922.5 MHz
The topology of LoRa network in this experiment is shown
in Figure 4. LoRa End Device embedded with the sensor is
connected to the gateway (RAK 831), then data will be stored
in Antares.id and accessed in the monitoring center. The scope
of the experiment carried out is as follows:
x Component that used in end device is Arduino Uno
microcontroller, GY-203 LUX sensor, and rfm95w LoRa
Radio module.
x Rfm95w LoRa radio module is work in 920-923 MHz
Band and using rp-sma antenna type.
x LoRa Gateway using in this experiment is a fabricated
component (RAK 831).
x IoT Platform that used for display the data result is using
Antares.id.
x Data Retrieval: Writing the data string, with 5 seconds
delay of each transmission. Data is transmitted in 10
minutes and will be analyzed. This process is repeated
during the experiment. Time of data collection is 2 hours.
x The experiment took place in the office indoor room.
x The distance between end device and the gateway is
about 3 meters long. End device and the gateway is in the
same room with low level obstacles.
x This experiment uses only one End Device, in order to
focus on transmitting only one data without other
interference from other devices.
x Parameter that analyzed in this research is large data bits
sent and the number of errors.
 



 


 

  
 

Generally, it can be concluded that the format of data

transmission will also effect on its power consumption.
Error Performance
Data transmission has a 5 second delay. Transmission is
considered an error if there is data that was not sent at the exact
time. The amount of data error is calculated for each
unsuccessful data sent at the correct time. With the time delay
is 5 seconds and the retrieval range of 5 minutes, there should
be 60 data sent. Table 4 shows the number of error occurred in
4 time of experiment.
TABLE 4. Number of errors
Experiment Number of Percentage (%)
errors
1 11 18%
2 8 13.3%
3 12 20%
4 5 8.3%
average %: 14.9%
FIGURE 4. LoRa Topology
Experiment 1 shows only 49 data is successfully received
and 11 data is failed. Experiment 2 shows only 52 data is
successfully received and 8 data is failed. Experiment 3 shows
IV. RESULT AND ANALYSIS only 48 data is successfully received and 12 data is failed.
Experiment 4 shows only 55 data is successfully received and
5 data is failed.
The result of data is displayed in Antares.id website in
format of json string, as shown in FIGURE 5. The data Based on these results it can be analyzed that the average
contains light intensity information in format: error of Lora End Device transmission is about 14.9%. Some
of the error can be caused by a network connectivity, the data
x "Light: %d lx" transportation in the internet. the performance of the backhaul
x "Here is the 0th LoRa data" internet might be the strong cause of error because some data
flow in its server network. The amount of data packet might be
crash on its way to server. Latency and disruption is another
caused of data error. Because of the latency, some of data are
failed to be decrypted. High traffic of data in the gateway is
another cause of error. Since the gateway is used for public,
another end device used outside the experiment are sending
data to the gateway, this conduct a high traffic data through the
gateway and possibly caused crash of data in server
transportation. The contributing factors of error, include
network connectivity or also caused by the obstacle objects
between End Device and the gateway.
Based on the experiment conducted, the LoRa is used as an
End Device, showing a successful data transmission
FIGURE 5. Sensor Data shown ini Antares.id
performance of about 85,1%. These results are still good
TABLE 3. Data bit string
enough for displaying monitoring data, especially for
parameters where the value does not change in a very short
String data Bit size (byte) time. To anticipate the lost or error data packets, the repetition
“Here is the 0th LoRa data” 2576 time of data transmission can be set to be smaller, so that more
“Light: %d lx” 2483 data is sent to carry the sensor data information at particular
time. However, the smaller number of repetition time it may
needs more storage and memory in server.
The longer the string data is used to display sensor data
information, the more memory it will consume. larger memory V. CONCLUSION
storage for a single data is wasteful. Therefor for a single The LoRa is implemented as an End Device node in sensor
sensor data, it is better to minimalize the string data that will be
network system in indoor application. Data from sensor is
sent. [6] Moreover, it also affecting more on power
successfully sent by LoRa transceiver to the gateway, with the
consumption because the more data will be modulated.

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average number of error is about 14,9%. It may be caused by
the network connectivity, data flow in server that have crash
possibility, the presence of obstacle between LoRa and
gateway or other transmission factors. Several parameters that
can be considered to improve the system performance include
channel frequency, number of data string bits, and also
interval time of data transmission, which can be adjusted
following to the characteristics of the parameters to be
monitored.
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