Experimental Assessment of Common Crucial Factors That Affect LoRaWAN Performance on Suburban and Rural Area Deployments

Abstract

LoRaWAN networks might be a technology that could facilitate extreme energy-efficient operation while offering great capacity for suburban and rural area deployment, but this can be a challenging task for a network administrator. Constraints that deform the trade-off triangle of coverage, scalability and energy efficiency need to be overcome. The scope of this study is to review the limitations of the LoRaWAN protocol in order to summarize and assess the crucial factors that affect communication performance, related to data rate allocation, bidirectional traffic and radio spectrum utilization. Based on the literature, these factors correspond mostly to configurable payload transmission parameters, including transmission interval, data rate allocation, requirement for acknowledgements and retransmission. In this work, with simulation experiments, we find that collision occurrences greatly affect channel occupancy. In particular, it was evaluated that collision occurrence is increasingly affected by transmission intervals, which have the most significant negative impact on packet delivery rate (PDR). We then validated that clustering of end nodes in the vicinity of a gateway, taking into account distance and transmission settings, can improve network scalability. This can assure distribution of the total transmission time to end nodes with respect to application-related QoS requirements. Following this clustering approach, we achieved a PDR greater than 0.90 in a simulation setting with 6000 end nodes in a 10 km coverage.

Multi-Objective Optimization of Gateway Location Selection in Long-Range Wide Area Networks: A Tradeoff Analysis between System Costs and Bitrate Maximization

“…In this study, we apply the Pareto front approach to the complex task of selecting optimal locations for multi-gateway deployment in large-scale LoRaWANs. Our objective is to achieve a harmonious equilibrium between minimizing overall costs and maximizing bitrate, as shown in Equation (17).…”

“…To formalize the problem, we utilize a general equation denoted as Equation (17), where the objective function f iq represents target i during the q sub-calculation. Specifically, for our endeavor in multi-gateway deployment in LoRaWANs, we adopt Equation (18) as the objective function.…”

“…The precise placement of LoRaWAN gateways plays a pivotal role in influencing critical factors such as cost, gateway capacity, bitrate, and quality of service, thereby ensuring the efficient and reliable operation of the network. Extensive research has emphasized the substantial benefits derived from optimizing gateway placement, including a potential 40% reduction in the required number of gateways and a 70% decrease in collision probability [17]. In vast agricultural regions, the utilization of clustering algorithms such as k-means and fuzzy c-means enhances uplink delivery rates and diminishes energy consumption [18].…”

Heterogeneous Communication Network Architecture for the Management of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations: Multi-Aggregator Management in Microgrids with High Photovoltaic Variability Based on Multiple Solar Radiation Sensors

“…Recent studies have further demonstrated the performance and applicability of these technologies in different scenarios. For example, research conducted in [ 9 ] indicates the superior reliability of NB-IoT in mining environments near urban settings, while Ref. [ 10 ] highlights the cost-effectiveness of LoRaWAN in rural and suburban deployments.…”