A Multi-User ACK-Aggregation Method for Large-Scale Reliable LoRaWAN Service

In this paper, we analyze the throughput of LoRaWAN Class-A data transfer with acknowledgement (ACK) under duty-cycle restriction which is imposed on gateways and end-devices. We show that ACK traffic limits the throughput of data traffic. We propose a method for aggregating ACKs from multiple users to improve the throughput and reliability of data transfer. The proposed method cumulates ACKs for multiple packets for multiple user-nodes. It also has schedules receive windows of user-nodes'. We show via performance analysis and simulation results that our method improves data transfer throughput by ten to thirty times.