Advancing LoRaWAN Network Efficiency through Dynamic Receive Window Adjustment

Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) is receiving wide acceptance by offering long-distance, low-power, robust, and cost-effective communication of sensory data to the server. LoRaWAN end devices open two receive windows to receive a downlink after the transmission of data to the server. However, optimizing the delay in opening these receive windows (known as RXDelay) is pivotal for efficient uplink and downlink communication. This task becomes even more challenging when application requirements change over time. To address such challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach to estimate and configure the optimal RXDelay of end devices. By leveraging the concept of the age of information at the network server, the proposed approach dynamically adapts RXDelay based on the specific demands of different scenarios, allowing for timely data transmission. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation on a real-world LoRaWAN deployment, the proposed approach demonstrates significant improvements in communication efficiency and overall network performance. Specifically, it outperforms existing methods in packet reception rate and energy efficiency for both confirmed and unconfirmed messages across diverse network conditions, while still ensuring a balanced throughput.