LoRaWAN Scheduling: From Concept to Implementation

While the Internet of Things continues to grow, the LoRaWAN standard is generating special interest due to its open-source nature, ultralow-power consumption and long-range connectivity. Recent works have explored the challenges of implementing LoRaWAN, with scalability being considered one of the major bottlenecks imposed by its Aloha-based medium access control (MAC) layer. Despite much on-going research on LoRaWAN scheduling aimed at alleviating this concern, experimental approaches are rarely found in the literature. In this work, we describe the steps taken and the technical issues overcome to move from a low-overhead synchronization and scheduling concept to its real-world implementation on top of LoRaWAN Class A. Accordingly, an end-to-end architecture was designed and deployed on top of STM32L0 MCUs, which communicate with a central entity responsible for providing synchronization metrics and allocating transmission slots on demand. The clock drift of devices was measured in a temperature-controlled chamber, which served as a basis to define slot lengths in the network. As a result, an operational end-to-end system was implemented and evaluated for different setup scenarios, with 10-ms accuracy being achieved. Our experimental results show significant improvements in packet delivery ratios with respect to Aloha-based setups, especially under high network loads (up to 29% for SF12), thereby demonstrating the feasibility of the presented approach.