LoRaWAN and 6LoWPAN Simulations in Medium to Large-Scale IoT Applications

Some widely-used IoT protocols for short-range and long-range applications are IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) and Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN), respectively. 6LoWPAN runs on top of IEEE 802.15.4 and offers low resource consumption and high packet throughput, while LoRaWAN supports bigger-scale applications with fewer data rates. However, recent related works on 6LoWPAN and LoRaWAN typically focus on smaller systems (e.g., 3–7 nodes), which may lack further analysis for medium- and large-scale scenarios. In this paper, we compared the simulation performance of 6LoWPAN and LoRaWAN at a higher number of nodes arranged in a star topology in low and high data rates. The results from the NS-3 simulator showed that while LoRaWAN had lower latency values than 6LoWPAN, the latter consumed less energy on average and better throughput in our target scenarios. Overall, the evaluation of the simulation results shows that 6LoWPAN can perform just as well as LoRaWAN and can be deployed in medium to large-scale applications.