LoRa vs. LoRa: In-Field Evaluation and Comparison For Long-Lifetime Sensor Nodes

Low-power and long-range communication have emerged as a promising technology for long lifetime Internet of Things devices and applications. LoRa is one of the most popular solution for low-power and long-range communication in IoT, providing mW power consumption and km range with few kB of throughput. Recently Semtech, the only LoRa transceiver producer, released the SX126X, a novel and optimized version of its popular SX1276 transceiver. Semtech promises lower power and higher range for the new transceiver. This paper analyzes and compares the power consumption of the two transceivers with experimental in-field measurements. Moreover, the paper presents a smart sensor node for the long term and long-range monitoring that use the novel transceiver to transmit data to a remote gateway. Experimental evaluation shows the improvements of the new SX126x transceiver with up to 72% of power saved in transmission over the same conditions. Furthermore, we show the lifetime of the whole senosr node, achieving up to 4.5 years with a 2000mAh battery while sensing and transmitting once per 10 minutes.