$FREE$ —Fine-Grained Scheduling for Reliable and Energy-Efficient Data Collection in LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN promises to provide wide-area network access to low-cost devices that can operate for up to ten years on a single 1000-mAh battery. This makes LoRaWAN particularly suited for the data collection applications (e.g., monitoring applications), where device lifetime is a key performance metric. However, when supporting a large number of devices, LoRaWAN suffers from a scalability issue due to the high collision probability of its Aloha-based MAC layer. The performance worsens further when using acknowledged transmissions due to the duty-cycle restriction at the gateway. For this, we propose FREE, a fine-grained scheduling scheme for reliable and energy-efficient data collection in LoRaWAN. FREE takes advantage of applications that do not have hard delay requirements on data delivery by supporting the synchronized bulk data transmission. This means data are buffered for transmission in scheduled time slots instead of transmitted straight away. FREE allocates spreading factors, transmission powers, frequency channels, time slots, and schedules slots in frames for LoRaWAN end-devices. As a result, FREE overcomes the scalability problem of LoRaWAN by eliminating collisions and grouping acknowledgments. We evaluate the performance of FREE versus different legacy LoRaWAN configurations. The numerical results show that FREE scales well and achieves almost 100% data delivery and the device lifetime is estimated over ten years independent of traffic type and network size. In comparison to poor scalability, low data delivery and device lifetime of fewer than two years for acknowledged data traffic in the standard LoRaWAN configurations.

[1]  Thomas Watteyne,et al.  Understanding the Limits of LoRaWAN , 2016, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[2]  Deepak Ganesan,et al.  Flit: a bulk transmission protocol for RFID-scale sensors , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[3]  Jan Beutel,et al.  Wireless Sensor Networks in Permafrost Research – Concept, Requirements, Implementation and Challenges , 2008 .

[4]  Sajal K. Das,et al.  Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Elements: A Survey , 2011, TOSN.

[5]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  a high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing , 2005, Wirel. Networks.

[6]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  Block-switched Networks: A New Paradigm for Wireless Transport , 2009, NSDI.

[7]  Gerhard P. Hancke,et al.  A Survey on Urban Traffic Management System Using Wireless Sensor Networks , 2016, Sensors.

[8]  Sofie Pollin,et al.  Range and coexistence analysis of long range unlicensed communication , 2016, 2016 23rd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT).

[9]  Electromagnetic compatibility and Radio spectrum Matters ( ERM ) ; Operation methods and principles for spectrum access systems for PMSE technologies and the guarantee of a high sound production quality on selected frequencies utilising cognitive interference mitigation techniques , 2022 .

[10]  Dirk Pesch,et al.  A Fair Adaptive Data Rate Algorithm for LoRaWAN , 2018, EWSN.

[11]  Ingrid Moerman,et al.  A Survey of LoRaWAN for IoT: From Technology to Application , 2018, Sensors.

[12]  David E. Culler,et al.  Flush: a reliable bulk transport protocol for multihop wireless networks , 2007, SenSys '07.

[13]  CongDuc Pham,et al.  Investigating and experimenting CSMA channel access mechanisms for LoRa IoT networks , 2018, 2018 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[14]  Andrzej Duda,et al.  Simulation of LoRa in NS-3: Improving LoRa Performance with CSMA , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[15]  Dimitrios Zorbas,et al.  Collision-Free Sensor Data Collection using LoRaWAN and Drones , 2018, 2018 Global Information Infrastructure and Networking Symposium (GIIS).

[16]  Alexandre Guitton,et al.  Performance analysis of the on-the-air activation in LoRaWAN , 2016, 2016 IEEE 7th Annual Information Technology, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (IEMCON).

[17]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  a high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing , 2003, MobiCom '03.

[18]  Utz Roedig,et al.  Do LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks Scale? , 2016, MSWiM.

[19]  Victoria J. Hodge,et al.  Wireless Sensor Networks for Condition Monitoring in the Railway Industry: A Survey , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[20]  Carles Gomez,et al.  Modeling the Energy Performance of LoRaWAN , 2017, Sensors.

[21]  Ilenia Tinnirello,et al.  Impact of LoRa Imperfect Orthogonality: Analysis of Link-Level Performance , 2018, IEEE Communications Letters.

[22]  Konstantin Mikhaylov,et al.  On LoRaWAN scalability: Empirical evaluation of susceptibility to inter-network interference , 2017, 2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC).

[23]  Konstantin Mikhaylov,et al.  Performance of a low-power wide-area network based on LoRa technology: Doppler robustness, scalability, and coverage , 2017, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[24]  Dirk Pesch,et al.  Offline Scheduling Algorithms for Time-Slotted LoRa-based Bulk Data Transmission , 2019, 2019 IEEE 5th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT).

[25]  Cem Ersoy,et al.  MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2006, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[26]  Matt Welsh,et al.  Fidelity and yield in a volcano monitoring sensor network , 2006, OSDI '06.

[27]  Dirk Pesch,et al.  Fair Adaptive Data Rate Allocation and Power Control in LoRaWAN , 2018, 2018 IEEE 19th International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM).

[28]  Andreas Terzis,et al.  Koala: Ultra-Low Power Data Retrieval in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (ipsn 2008).

[29]  Mahesh Sooriyabandara,et al.  Does Bidirectional Traffic Do More Harm Than Good in LoRaWAN Based LPWA Networks? , 2017, GLOBECOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference.

[30]  Jean Schwoerer,et al.  Capacity limits of LoRaWAN technology for smart metering applications , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[31]  Aline Baggio,et al.  Wireless sensor networks in precision agriculture , 2005 .

[32]  Ingrid Moerman,et al.  Low Overhead Scheduling of LoRa Transmissions for Improved Scalability , 2019, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

[33]  Sofie Pollin,et al.  Improving Reliability and Scalability of LoRaWANs Through Lightweight Scheduling , 2018, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.