Long Range SigFox Communication Protocol Scalability Analysis Under Large-Scale, High-Density Conditions

In recent years, the IoT concept is more and more powerful, having set the goal of integrating billions of devices to the Internet. Thus, from this perspective, the interest allocated to low-power wireless networks of sensors is higher than ever. In this paper, the SigFox scalability is analyzed from the IoT concept point of view. In the scientific research, there are a series of papers which tackle the SigFox issues, oftentimes at a comparative study level, without evaluating the performance level of the communication protocol. This paper comes to fill this gap by creating a realistic SigFox communication model. Moreover, a developed and tested generator of SigFox traffic has been implemented, using SDRs. This allows the possibility of evaluating the performance level of WSN networks, of a large-scale high-density-type. Both of the suggested instruments represent the novelty of this paper. The obtained results show that the maximum number of sensors that can transmit data at the same time, using the proposed scenarios, is of approximately 100, in order to obtain a high level of performance when the number of available channels is 360. If we are to increase the number of sensors, an avalanche effect ensues which triggers the sharp decrease of the performance of the SigFox network. At the end of this work, a series of solutions are being suggested with the main purpose of increasing the performance level of large-scale, high-density SigFox networks.