LoRaHop: Multihop Support for LoRaWAN Uplink and Downlink Messaging

LoRaWAN is one of the most popular protocols to build low-power wide area networks. Unfortunately, it adopts a star topology, which limits network coverage and may also cause an unnecessary decrease in energy efficiency as well as scalability. In fact, end-devices that are deployed far away from a gateway need to increase their transmission power or spreading factor (SF) to sustain reliable communications, which increases their energy expenditure as well as the size of the collision domain. The only alternative is the deployment of additional gateways or dedicated relay nodes, which results in higher costs and deployment efforts. In this work, we introduce LoRaHop, an extension of LoRaWAN that enriches end-devices with the ability to form a mesh network and to seamlessly relay packets to/from a gateway, thereby providing LoRaWAN networks with multihop support for both uplink and downlink messaging. LoRaHop leverages concurrent transmissions to enable a reliable and efficient data collection or dissemination over the mesh network, as well as to simplify network formation. Furthermore, LoRaHop embeds a mechanism that simplifies rendezvous across devices and that minimizes the impact of mesh operations on existing LoRaWAN transmissions. We implement LoRaHop on off-the-shelf LoRa end-devices (ensuring their interoperability with commercial LoRaWAN gateways and network servers), and evaluate its performance on an outdoor testbed. Our results show that LoRaHop can effectively extend the coverage of an LoRaWAN network while improving reliability by up to 98.33% and reducing energy consumption by up to 48.02%. Our findings further demonstrate that using LoRaHop to create a multihop LoRaWAN network that communicates using low SFs brings significant benefits in terms of energy efficiency and scalability compared to the use of a single-hop LoRaWAN network using high SFs.