LoRaWAN as Secondary Telemetry Communication System for Drone Delivery

Abstract

Increasing popularity of drones inspires some people and companies to start using them as end-to-end package delivery tools. Despite reducing delivery time, drones running on batteries typically have a high power consumption relative to their battery capacity to provide power for motors, flight controller, and communication systems. Most drones do not have communication systems that provide a long-range coverage while preserving the power consumption. Developing a long-range and energy-efficient communication system becomes a main concern of this research. In terms of wireless physical layer technology, LoRa becomes one of the possible options due to its power efficiency. LoRaWAN, a de-facto standard protocol for LoRa intended for wide area networking, can be used for drone delivery application. However, it is not suitable for real-time and control-heavy applications. In this paper, the limits of LoRaWAN as a secondary communication mode for drone delivery system are evaluated. The results show that LoRaWAN protocol can still be used for a semi-real-time telemetry purpose in which it can send 10–20 bytes payload regularly with minimum of 2–3 seconds interval. In terms of coverage, the system can achieve up to 8 km in an urban area as tested, using the lowest spreading factor, considering the imperfection factor from the hardware. The percentage of packet loss using this configuration is still tolerable, i.e., up to 5%.