Long-Term Performance Studies of a LoRaWAN-Based PM2.5 Application on Campus

Recently, LoRa/LoRaWAN has been proposed as a promising LPWAN technology for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. For monitoring the long-term PM2.5 air quality on our campus, starting from February 1 2017, we have set up a LoRaWAN-based PM2.5 air quality monitoring system on our campus. In total, twenty-two PM2.5 sensor devices have been operating at the rooftop of buildings or on the lamp poles since then. Each of these PM2.5 sensor devices uses a LoRaWAN module to send its most recent PM2.5 value to the LoRaWAN gateway every 72 seconds. After being received successfully by the LoRaWAN gateway, the packets carrying these values were stored into a database with their SNR/RSSI information. With the sequence numbers added by our PM2.5 application running on each device, the packets stored in the database provide many important information about the long-term packet loss rate performance of LoRaWAN on campus. In this paper, we process these data to report real long-term performance of LoRaWAN when used on campus.