Augmenting LoRaWAN Performance With Listen Before Talk

Standard LoRaWANs leverage pure ALOHA at the medium access control layer, which is proved to be a performance bottleneck as the network size scales up. Stimulated by this fact, this paper studies the applicability and the performance of listen before talk (LBT) medium access schemes in the context of LoRaWANs. We consider two different implementations of LBT: physical layer LBT based on energy detection only and MAC layer LBT based on layer 2 frame decoding, and we propose a Markovian framework to evaluate the performance of LoRaWANs under such setting in terms of data extraction rate and average delay experienced by transmitted uplink messages. The proposed framework is also leveraged to assess the performance of “mixed” LoRaWAN scenarios, where some devices access the channel according to the standard-compliant ALOHA protocol, while other devices transmit according to LBT.