Short: Achieving Energy Efficiency in Dense LoRaWANs through TDMA

Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWANs) have recently emerged as a hot research topic for their capability to collect sporadic data from a great number of widely spread low power devices. By enabling low-cost low-traffic wireless communications at large scale, such networks can be adopted in many application domains, including smart agriculture, logistics, and emergency detection among others. LoRaWAN employs a pure ALOHA default medium access scheme, that limits the maximum achievable throughput to 18%. Increasing the number of terminals would lead to more frame collisions, and eventually to network collapse. The easiest way to allow bigger network sizes is to synchronize devices, so that they can discretize time into slots, and use them to schedule frame transmissions. Herein, a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) scheme on the top of LoRaWANs is highly desired. However, since keeping synchronization can lead to heavy energy consumption, the design of such scheme should enforce energy-efficiency. This contribution describes the technical issues related to the implementation of such mechanism, that as a matter of fact represents the cornerstone on which more sophisticated random access protocols or even scheduling techniques can be designed. In dense networks, the proposed scheme combined with a very simple slotted ALOHA mechanism has also been shown to outperform the default LoRaWAN access protocol in terms of expected energy consumption.