Description
The use of the LoRa (Long Range) PHY and LoRaWAN MAC layer as a wireless communication standard for IoT devices has seen growth over the last few years, with long range, low power, and low cost being the driving force. LoRa communication standard is viewed as an alternative to present state of the art high power consuming and commercial communication standards used for IoT based applications. LoRa is now beginning to see use in low data rate, long range devices for consumer smart metering and demand response applications. Smart meters measure local electrical attributes such as power factor and instantaneous, RMS, and peak voltage, current, and power (real and reactive). The use of LoRaWAN protocol in smart metering application has been a great boost for the system. These smart meter attributes are sampled and transmitted to an electric utility as uplink messages at the highest possible rate to allow the utility to maintain the closest approximation to the real-time state of an electric grid. LoRa transceivers embedded within residential smart meters send uplink messages to local, utility operated neighborhood gateways/network server that are connected to a WAN and ultimately connect back to a utility’s LAN. Gateways/network server serve as message carriers that copy a received LoRaWAN uplink payload into a MQTT publish message that is sent to a utility’s application server. This thesis discusses using governing LoRaWAN parameters to optimally place the LoRa nodes and gateways to enable efficient two-way communication mechanism for the smart meters. The results and analysis for the thesis is supported by using the latency (packet delay) measured between end device transmission, gateway receive, and server receive and compare with LoRaWAN packet time-on-air (ToA). Measure the upper bound on measurement uplink rate for LoRaWAN smart metering infrastructure such that ratio of utilization factor is maintained under 1.
