Improving LoRaWAN Performance Using Reservation ALOHA

Abstract

LoRaWAN is one of the new and updated standards for IoT applications. However, the expected high density of peripheral devices for each gateway, and the absence of an operative synchronization mechanism between the gateway and peripherals, all of which challenges the networks scalability. In this paper, we propose to normalize the communication of LoRaWAN networks using a Reservation-ALOHA (R-ALOHA) instead of the standard ALOHA approach used by LoRa. The implementation is a library package placed on top of the standard LoRaWAN; thus, no modification in pre-existing LoRaWAN structure and libraries is required. Our proposed approach is based on a distributed synchronization service that is suitable for low-cost IoT end-nodes. R-ALOHA LoRaWAN gives better performance in comparison with the previous models; Pure-ALOHA LoRaWAN, Slotted-ALOHA LoRaWAN, and TDMA LoRaWAN. It significantly improves the performance of network regarding the probability of collision, the maximum throughput, and the maximum duty cycle.