An investigation of the transmission success in Lorawan enabled IoT-HAPS communication

As the communication and aviation technology expand, High altitude platform stations (HAPS) are increasingly gaining a wider usage area in modern Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. One of the areas in which HAPS can be effectively utilized is the wide area deployment of sensors that require a costly data acquisition effort in terms of transportation and communication access. Aerial communication using a low-energy technology such as LoRa can provide significant advantages in such scenarios. Our work models and simulates LoRAWAN communication in utilizing HAPS in data acquisition over a large distribution span of IoT devices/sensors. We conduct experiments on various different scenarios including changing number of devices, span area, HAPS speed and LoRa duty cycle to draw conclusions about how each of these parameters affect communication quality. Results of the simulation are used in regression analysis of equation factors to calculate the expected transmission performance under different experimental setups. Our results (and simulation code) can be used to reason about certain properties of IoT deployment (such as sensor count, sensor distribution area, HAPS speed, etc.) before the real deployment is done in LoRaWAN enabled IoT-HAPS communication.