The Effect of Imperfect Channel Sensing for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks With Listen-Before-Talk

This study investigates ALOHA with listen-before-talk (LBT) to enhance the scalability of low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), such as long range (LoRa). The LBT allows devices to sense the channel prior to accessing so that it can mitigate interference by preventing devices from transmitting during ongoing transmissions. However, its effectiveness is compromised by inherent imperfections in channel sensing, such as false negatives and false positives. A false negative occurs when devices incorrectly find the channel idle while it is actually in use. Thus, this leads devices to unintended interferences with ongoing transmissions. A false positive arises when the channel is erroneously sensed as busy, despite the fact that it is free. This deprives devices of access opportunities. This work analyzes the impact of these imperfections of LBT on the performance of ALOHA in terms of throughput, access delay, and system stability. Additionally, we propose an online backoff control algorithm to optimize system performance under imperfect LBT. The results show that even when devices falsely identify the channel as idle or mistakenly detect it as busy nearly half the time, the throughput still outperforms that of ALOHA without LBT. The proposed backoff control algorithm is also shown to be essential to maximize the throughput in the presence of sensing errors. To demonstrate our analysis and algorithm, we incorporate LoRa’s physical layer parameters into simulations and validate the results accordingly.