Study of LoRaWAN Networks Reliability

• Main Authors: Rayess, Juliana El, Khawam, Kinda, Lahoud, Samer, Helou, Melhem El, Martin, Steven
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aloha type access; Batteries; data link layer; Energy consumption; Interference cancellation; LoRAWAN; Memory management; Numerical models; Numerical simulation; Performance evaluation; reliability
• ISSN: 2159-6972
• DOI: 10.1109/CIoT57267.2023.10084880

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly evolving field that incorporates a wide range of technologies and applications, enabling the seamless integration of everyday objects into the digital world. The effective integration of IoT into various systems requires the implementation of lightweight solutions to overcome the challenges posed by highly dense networks and constrained resources, including computational power, memory capacity, and battery life. The present research is dedicated to investigating a specific context of the Internet of Things (Io'T), namely LoRaWAN, in which devices communicate with the access network using ALOHA-type access and spread spectrum technology. LoRaWAN advocates simplicity in order to reduce drastically the battery consumption, which severely degrades reliability. In this paper we introduce blind repetition in LoRaWAN: a packet is retransmitted a fixed number of times regardless of its good reception. Leveraging on existing data link layer functionalities, we compare this redundant mode to two existing modes, namely the unacknowledged mode and acknowledged mode. We run extensive simulations that consider the capture effect in LoRaWAN, in addition to the non-uniform distribution of devices. In such a realistic scenario, we perform thorough numerical simulations to quantify the discrepancy between the three modes, and identify the traffic conditions for which a given mode has precedence over the two others.