LoRa-based System for IoT Applications via HAPS in Remote Areas

5G and 6G mobile communication systems will encompass a Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) that will include different satellite systems as well as High-Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) in the stratosphere to cover remote areas that otherwise could not have access to the Internet. The interest of this paper is to investigate the Internet of Things (IoT) for remote unconnected areas for environmental monitoring applications where LoRa transceivers send data from sensors on the ground to HAPS. The scope of this paper is to investigate system tradeoffs concerning HAPS altitude, ground IoT device transmission power, and IoT device density. A suitable ISM-band propagation model has been used for the communication from ground sensors to the HAPS. LoRa communication undergoes different phenomena due to shadowing effects and collisions. Different spreading factors are adopted depending on the distance from the HAPS. The study has permitted to validate the applicability of LoRa to communications with HAPS, investigating the probability of successful transmissions and the resulting throughput.