LIDS: Lightweight Dynamic Scheduling Technique for 6G-enabled Massive LoRa based IoT Systems

The sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication networks are envisioned to deliver improved Quality of Services (QoS) such as data-rate, latency, localization, etc., compared to 5G services. This demand will mainly arise due to the massive Internet of Things (IoT) connections among billions of embedded devices. It is worth noting that these IoT devices are constrained in nature in terms of memory, computation and most importantly power. Low-power wireless computing necessitates a link-layer technology that considers the aforementioned IoT device requirements such as low-power, low data-rate, long-range and energy efficient reliable communications. Long Range Radio (LoRa) technology has recently become widely popular to facilitate low-power, long-range communication, while other similar technologies struggle to achieve long-range transmissions. The LoRA standard defines several PHY and MAC sub-layer specifications for Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) that can be used to build several IoT applications. With 6G communications, an IoT application is expected to consist of hundreds of devices connected at a time, and this will need a proper scheduling mechanism among these devices for optimal performance. The LoRa standard does not define any scheduling mechanism and leaves it to the research community to explore. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheduling mechanism under the supervision of a common LoRa gateway. The proposed mechanism focuses on a Lightweight DynamicScheduling (LIDS) scheme to minimize loss in data transmissions through collisions. The proposed mechanism optimizes the power consumption to achieve the desired level of QoS requirements such as throughput and latency.