High-Performance Long Range-Based Medium Access Control Layer Protocol

Long Range (LoRa) has become one of the most promising physical layer technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Although it manifests low-power consumption and long-distance communication, LoRa encounters a large number of collisions in the IoT environment, which severely affects the system’s throughput and delay performance. In this paper, a code division carrier sense multiple access (CD/CSMA) protocol that resolves the traditional channel collision problem and implements multi-channel transmission is proposed for the LoRa medium access control (MAC) layer. To reduce data transmission delay and maximize the throughput of the system, the adaptive p-persistent CSMA protocol divides the channel load into four states and dynamically adjusts the data transmission probability. Then, to reduce channel collisions significantly, the code division multiple access (CDMA) protocol is performed on different channel states. Moreover, the combination of the proposed adaptive p-persistent CSMA protocol and the CDMA successfully reduces the number of data retransmissions and makes LoRa more stable. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive p-persistent CD/CSMA protocol can achieve near-optimal and occasionally even better performance than some conventional MAC protocols, especially in a heavy load channel.