Graph-Based Gateway Placement for Better Performance in LoRaWAN Deployments

Low Power Wide Area Networks with Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWANs) as one of their most prominent representatives are very promising solutions for future Internet of Things deployments. The technology is characterized by low energy requirements leading to long battery lifetimes. However, the drawback is very limited throughput rates. However, the unreliable nature of the LoRa technology is hindering the adoption. Especially its random channel access approach leads to significant message collisions and thus, data loss in larger deployments. From a network planning point of view, one possibility to deal with collisions is the reduction of potentially colliding messages at the frequency bands in combination with limiting the transmission duration of messages. For that reason, we present a novel graph-based gateway placement approach. The main focus is collision probability reduction, which directly increases reliability in LoRaWAN deployments. We show that our approach performs similar to state-of-the-art related work in the worst case and reduces the required number of gateways by up to 40% while reducing the collision probability by up to 70 %. Furthermore, we discuss the scalability of our approach to cover arbitrarily large networks with gateways and only little overhead by splitting the problem into smaller sub-problems.

Automated summary

Low Power Wide Area Networks, particularly LoRaWANs, are promising solutions for future Internet of Things deployments due to their low energy requirements and long battery lifetimes. However, the limited throughput rates and unreliable nature of LoRa technology hinder its widespread adoption. To address the issue of message collisions, a novel graph-based gateway placement approach is proposed to reduce collision probability and increase reliability in LoRaWAN deployments. The approach performs similarly to state-of-the-art related work and reduces the required number of gateways by up to 40% while decreasing the collision probability by up to 70%.