uLoRa: Ultra Low-Power, Low-Cost and Open Platform for the LoRa Networks

Abstract

Long-Range (LoRa) is an emerging technology that is proposed to realize the Internet of Things (IoT). It enables very long range (up to 15 km) wireless communications with very low-power consumption. Many applications are being enabled by LoRa, such as water flow monitoring, animal tracking, smart parking, among many others. Although LoRa has attracted significant attentions from both industry and academia, its current cost and energy consumption are bringing inconveniences for the academia to exploit and improve LoRa's performance, e.g., when massive deployment of LoRa nodes are required in order to study the scalability performance of LoRa networks. In this paper, we design and implement uLoRa, an ultra low-power, low cost, and open-source platform for LoRa networks. uLoRa is built around an ultra low-power ARM processor. Each uLoRa node only costs ≈10 euros. To reduce the energy consumption of uLoRa, we optimize its design and implementation in both the hardware and software. We evaluate the performance of uLoRa with experiments, in terms of energy consumption and communication coverage. Compared to state-of-the-art LoRa platform, uLoRa can reduce the cost by two thirds and can double the battery life of the nodes. We also demonstrate the flexibility of uLoRa through the application of moisture monitoring.