Heterogeneous LoRaWan deployment for application dependent IOT networks

Abstract

In this study, we present an application-dependent heterogeneous LoRa network. Previous studies on LoRaWAN and particularly studies that rely on the use of adaptive data rate to optimize the performance of the network are based purely on the path loss of the nodes in the network with the assumption that all nodes in the network have similar requirements in terms of data rate and latency. In a real-life full-scale deployment, this is unlikely to be the case as the current LoRaWAN deployment trend shows that practical implementations are service-based. This approach means that critical applications will suffer reliability issues since they will have to compete with non-critical services for the same resources. To address this problem, we propose a heterogeneous LoRaWAN that is capable of providing support for applications ranging from delay-tolerant to delay intolerant with improved reliability through preferential transmission parameter allocation. Our study shows that this approach can increase the probability of successful uplink transmission of the critical applications by up to 44 percent and for transmitting nodes within a 3 km radius of the gateway, heterogeneous LoRaWAN possesses a 20 percent higher uplink packet delivery rate in comparison with the homogeneous network at the cost of slightly higher energy consumption.