Cooperative Downlink Listening for Low-Power Long-Range Wide-Area Network

Abstract

Abstract:Recently, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications has become more active with the emergence of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), which has the advantages of low-power and long communication distance. Among the various LPWAN technologies, long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN, or LoRa) is considered as the most mature technology. However, since LoRa performs uplink-oriented communication to increase energy efficiency, there is a restriction on the downlink function from the network server to the end devices. In this paper, we propose cooperative downlink listening to solve the fundamental problem of LoRa. In particular, the proposed scheme can be extended to various communication models such as groupcasting and geocasting by combining with the data-centric model. Experiments also show that the proposed technology not only significantly reduces network traffic compared to the LoRa standard, but also guarantees maximum energy efficiency of the LoRa.

Modeling the Energy Performance of LoRaWAN

“…Several works provide current consumption data of LoRa/LoRaWAN devices, obtained from a datasheet or by empirical means [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Such details, which are summarized in Table 1 , correspond to sleep, transmission and reception device states.…”

“…Based on the characterization of sleep, transmit and receive states of a LoRa/LoRaWAN device, a few analytical models of LoRa/LoRaWAN energy consumption, node lifetime or energy cost of data delivery have been published [ 13 , 22 , 25 , 26 ]. However, these models are too simple, since there exist several other states for a LoRa/LoRaWAN device involved in a communication that need to be considered (see Section 4 ).…”

“…Among LPWAN technologies, LoRaWAN (and its related modulation, LoRa), is perhaps the technology that has attracted the attention of most academic work as of the writing of this paper [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. This can be explained by the public availability of its specifications [ 27 ], the availability of certified hardware [ 28 ] and the fact that LoRaWAN communication can be enabled without the need to establish a relationship with an operator.…”

“…Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the characteristics of LoRaWAN energy consumption. However, published works only focus on this topic to a limited extent, providing only rough estimates on parameters related with LoRaWAN energy performance, while not considering realistic behavior of LoRaWAN device hardware, as well as the impact of the main LoRaWAN parameters and mechanism settings [ 13 , 22 , 25 , 26 ].…”

Performance Evaluation of LoRaWAN Communication Scalability in Large‐Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

“…When the transfer rate increases, the throughput of the LoRa network is limited by the duty cycle parameter that limits the number of transmitted packets, thus stabilizing the throughput. If the network has a large number of nodes, the throughput is limited by the number of collisions; meanwhile, for a low number of nodes the network's throughput is restricted by the duty cycle parameter [25].…”