Performance Evaluation of LoRa-Based Wireless Sensor Network for Smart Waste Bank Data Transmission

This study presents the design and performance evaluation of a LoRa-based Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) prototype for data transmission in a Smart Waste Bank system operating in a semi-urban environment. The proposed system adopts a hybrid network architecture, combining multi-hop communication among sensor nodes with a star topology for long-range transmission to a Raspberry Pi–based sink node. An ESP32 microcontroller integrated with a LoRa SX1278 module operating at 433 MHz is used to transmit waste volume and activity data with low power consumption. Unlike prior studies that predominantly focus on generic LoRa performance evaluation, this research provides a contextual and application-driven assessment of LoRa-based WSN communication tailored to community-scale Smart Waste Bank operations under non-line-of-sight conditions. System performance was evaluated using RSSI, SNR, and PDR at transmission distances ranging from 10 m to 1000 m. Experimental results show that RSSI decreases from −56 dB to −112 dB and SNR from 6.3 dB to 1.0 dB as distance increases, while the system maintains reliable communication with an average PDR of 97% up to 800 m. Distinct from existing LoRa performance studies, this work explicitly integrates a hybrid multi-hop and star WSN topology within a real-world smart waste bank deployment, providing empirical communication benchmarks that are directly applicable to community-scale IoT implementations rather than controlled or generic test scenarios.