Industrial LoRa: A Novel Medium Access Strategy for LoRa in Industry 4.0 Applications

Among the Low-Power Wide Area technologies available today, LoRa is one of the most successful, as it enables robust long-distance low-power communications in the unlicensed sub_GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band. A number of solution providers and network operators show much interest in this technology for Industry 4.0 applications. In addition, LoRa represent a promising candidate for boosting future Industrial Internet of Things networks and services. However, the current standardized LoRaWAN Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol over LoRa does not fully cope with the requirements of industrial networks, in particular as far as the scheduling of real-time data flow is concerned. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes Industrial LoRa, a novel medium access strategy for LoRa that enables the implementation of industrial wireless networks for Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 applications. The paper describes the proposed MAC scheme and the advantages it provides. A simulative assessment shows the performance of the proposed approach in a realistic scenario that is compliant with the requirements of soft real-time applications in Industry 4.0.