Comparative Analysis of an Urban LoRaWAN Deployment: Real World Versus Simulation

LoRaWAN simulations are a flexible way to analyse the behaviour of this LPWAN technology in scenarios that are unfeasible to deploy due to their scale and the number of devices required. Parallel to this, there is also a continued lack of larger-scale LoRaWAN deployments in current literature. Crucially, none of these studies involves comparison with any theoretical model, such as discrete-time simulation or mathematical analysis, for validation. In this paper we deploy a 20 nodes LoRaWAN network around the University of Glasgow's campus, analyse the results and then proceed to develop an NS-3 simulation to recreate and match as faithfully as possible the behaviour and topology of the physical deployment. The performance of both the deployment and the simulation is then compared, and the results show that while the complexity of the simulation is kept relatively low, it is possible to get simulation results within about 20% of the deployment results.