A Novel LoRaWAN Scheduling Scheme for Improving Reliability and Collision Avoidance

The employment of Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) has proven quite beneficial to the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. The utilization of low power but long range communication links of the LoRaWAN technology promises low energy consumption, while ensuring sufficient throughput. However, due to LoRa's original scheduling process there is a high chance of packet collisions, compromising the technology's reliability. In this paper, we propose a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, entitled the RCA-LoRa towards improving reliability and collision avoidance in LoRa wide-area networks. The novel scheduling process that is introduced is based on the broadcasting of beacon frames by the network's gateway in order to synchronize communication with end devices. Our results demonstrate the benefits of RCA-LoRa over an enhanced version of the legacy LoRaWAN employing the ALOHA protocol and an advanced adaptive rate mechanism, in terms of throughput and collision avoidance. Indicatively, in a single cell scenario with 600 nodes, RCA-LoRa can increase throughput by nearly 50.