Waveform monitoring with LoRaWAN: Is it feasible?

LoRaWAN is well suited for the transmission of small amounts of numeric data, while its technical features are not conceived for the continuous real-time monitoring of time-evolving signals. The aim of this paper is to discuss the usability of the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology for the continuous transmission of signals characterized by different scales of variability. At the purpose the so-called burst-mode acquisition is considered and analyzed for a LoraWAN infrastructure. Furthermore, a very simple messaging protocol is introduced to increase data throughput, by allowing application-level messages to be sent using the same data message, avoiding extra overload. To demonstrate this approach, the paper focuses on possible techniques to perform a long-term monitoring of the electrocardiographic (ECG) signal over a LoRaWAN communication infrastructure where duty cycle induced constraints are carefully considered. The analysis of real signals proves the feasibility of the proposed system, which can be easily generalized for other kind of signals.