With the introduction of Sigfox and LoRa, the Internet of Things (IoT) segment has again seen the addition of new wireless standards to its growing market. The Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) standards operate in the European 868 MHz ISM band, but with a very different approach to the radio interface implementation.
Considering the new standards and the IoT state of the market, a team of researchers from the Wireless Communication Networks (WCN) section at the Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University in Denmark are studying and comparing the system performance for various IoT standards as a part of their ongoing WCN research project IoT Living Lab. Dr. Mads Lauridsen and Dr. Ignacio Rodriguez Larrad have already performed real world coverage tests with the two IoT systems and now want to complement these measurements with analysis of the system performance and link budget in a controlled and repeatable test environment provided by Bluetest.
Bluetest’s proposed test setup uses the RTS65 OTA (over-the-air) reverberation chamber with the integrated software platform Flow, and the programmable ISS11 Attenuator, a step attenuator to control the path loss between the base station and the device. The measurement solution uses real Sigfox and LoRa base stations connected to their respective back-end servers, providing direct feedback about the number of received messages from the IoT devices and the signal quality of these received messages.
The results from the measurement campaign will be submitted in a conference paper sometime during 2017.
