Fast and Reliable LoRa-based Data Transmissions

LoRaWAN is a recently proposed MAC layer protocol which manages communications between LoRa-based gate-ways and end-devices. It has attracted much scientific attention due its physical layer characteristics, but mainly due to its versatile configuration parameters. However, it is known that LoRaWAN-based transmissions suffer from extensive collisions due to the unregulated access to the medium. For this reason, various techniques that alleviate the burst of collisions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we deal with the problem of fast data delivery in LoRa-based networks. We model a network where transmissions follow a Poisson process. We compute the average packet success probability per Spreading Factor (SF) assuming orthogonal transmissions. We, then, formulate an SF optimization problem to maximize the success probability given an amount of data per node and a maximum data collection time window. We show – both theoretically and using simulations – that the overall success probability can be improved by approximately 100% using optimal SF assignments. We validate our findings using a 10-node testbed and extensive experiments. Despite that experiments reveal the existence of inter-SF interference, our solution still provides the best performance compared to other LoRaWAN configurations.