Towards LoRaWAN without Data Loss: Studying the Performance of Different Channel Access Approaches

The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one of the fastest growing Internet of Things (IoT) access protocols. It operates in the license free 868 MHz band and gives everyone the possibility to create their own small sensor networks. The drawback of this technology is often unscheduled or random channel access, which leads to message collisions and potential data loss. For that reason, recent literature studies alternative approaches for LoRaWAN channel access. In this work, state-of-the-art random channel access is compared with alternative approaches from the literature by means of collision probability. Furthermore, a time scheduled channel access methodology is presented to completely avoid collisions in LoRaWAN. For this approach, an exhaustive simulation study was conducted and the performance was evaluated with random access cross-traffic. In a general theoretical analysis the limits of the time scheduled approach are discussed to comply with duty cycle regulations in LoRaWAN.

Automated summary

LoRaWAN is a fast-growing IoT access protocol that allows users to create small sensor networks in a license-free frequency band. However, the random channel access can lead to message collisions and data loss. Therefore, alternative approaches, including a time scheduled channel access method, have been proposed.