Performance Analysis and Optimal Tuning of IETF LPWAN SCHC ACK-on-Error Mode

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Working Group has developed the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) framework to enable IPv6 over LPWAN. In order to support 1280-byte packets, as required for IPv6, SCHC includes a fragmentation functionality, since relevant LPWAN technologies offer very short data unit sizes and do not provide native fragmentation mechanisms. SCHC offers 3 fragmentation modes: No-ACK, ACK-Always, and ACK-on-Error, the latter being especially promising due to its reliability and high efficiency. In this article, we develop a mathematical model to compute the most critical performance parameters for the SCHC ACK-on-Error mode, namely, the acknowledgment traffic incurred by a fragment receiver for the successful delivery of a fragmented packet. The model is used to evaluate the SCHC ACK-on-Error mode performance, as well as to optimally tune its main parameters when used over LoRaWAN and Sigfox, for different packet sizes. Additionally, we illustrate how our derived optimal settings allow to reduce the acknowledgment traffic in a number of scenarios.