LoRa-DuCy: Duty Cycling for LoRa-Enabled Internet of Things Devices

The LoRa (Long Range) communication technology has gained a lot of interest recently. Typically, Internet of Things applications would use the complete LoRaWAN stack for their purposes. However, LoRaWAN supports only three types of communication, called classes A, B, and C. Each of these classes addresses a different application scenario and resource usage goals, but all of them target star topologies, where devices communicate only to the gateway. On the other hand, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been successfully developing and using the concept of self-organised networks and duty cycling. In this paper, we combine these fields and implement a WSN duty-cycling medium access protocol, known as Contiki-MAC, on LoRa-enabled LoPy4 devices. We experimentally evaluate our implementation and we compare its power consumption with that of LoRaWAN-enabled devices. We show that our implementation is more power-efficient while achieving higher traffic rates and offering the freedom of self-organised networking for various applications.