Internet of Things (IoT) radio networks are becoming popular in several scenarios for short-range applications (e.g., wearables and home security) and medium-range applications (e.g., shipping container tracking and autonomous farming). They have also been proposed for water monitoring in flood warning systems. IoT communications may use long range (LoRa) radios working in the 915 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. In this research, we study the propagation characteristics of LoRa chirp radio signals close to and over water in a tropical meadow region. We use as a case study the Colima River in Mexico. We develop a novel point-to-point IoT measurement sounding system that does not require decoding of LoRa propriety bursts and provides accurate power versus distance profiles along the riparian zone of a steeply dropping mountain river. We used this system to obtain the measurements reported in this work, which are also analyzed and modeled. The results show that the LoRa signal propagation over water exhibits a log-normal distribution. As a result of the chirp signal processing, two new experimental path loss models are presented. The path loss results show a considerable degradation of the received signal power over water within vegetation and less signal degradation at antenna heights closer to the water surface.

In Long Term Evolution (LTE) Resource Allocation Algorithms (RAAs) are an area of work where researchers are seeking to optimize the efficient use of scarce radio resources. The selection of an optimal Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) that allows LTE to adapt to channel conditions is a second area of ongoing work. In the wireless part of LTE, these two factors, RAA and MCS selection, are the most critical in optimization. In this paper, the performance of three resource allocation schemes is compared, and a new allocation scheme, Average MCS (AMCS) allocation, is proposed. AMCS is seen to outperform both “Minimum MCS (MMCS)” and “Average Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio MCS (SINR AMCS)” in terms of improvements to LTE Uplink (UL) performance. The three algorithms were implemented in the Vienna LTE-A Uplink Simulator v1.5.