Energy Efficiency Analysis of Centralized-Synchronous LoRa-based MAC Protocols

LoRa is a PHY layer technology that has been gaining popularity with IoT platfrom developers, due to its low-power long-range communication. As a result, different classes of LoRabased MAC layer protocols have been proposed, with the key ones being either contention-based or centralized-synchronous. Since most of the research literature focused on analyzing the efficiency of contention-based LoRa protocols, we sought to study the efficiency of centralized-synchronous protocols. We utilized a tailored simulator to analyze the energy efficiency of LoRa-based centralized-synchronous protocols. Our findings, are backed up by hardware performance measurements. After comparing the energy efficiency of the centralized-synchronous protocols against that of other LoRa-based MAC layer protocol classes, we found that the lifetime of a device using a centralized-synchronous protocol was up to four times longer than that of a contentionbased device. These findings, as well as our insights, will aid the development of future energy-efficient LoRa-based MAC protocols.