Impact of EU duty cycle and transmission power limitations for sub-GHz LPWAN SRDs : an overview and future challenges

Long-range sub-GHz technologies such as LoRaWAN, SigFox, IEEE 802.15.4, and DASH7 are increasingly popular for academic research and daily life applications. However, especially in the European Union (EU), the use of their corresponding frequency bands are tightly regulated, since they must confirm to the short-range device (SRD) regulations. Regulations and standards for SRDs exist on various levels, from global to national, but are often a source of confusion. Not only are multiple institutes responsible for drafting legislation and regulations, depending on the type of document can these rules be informational or mandatory. Regulations also vary from region to region; for example, regulations in the United States of America (USA) rely on electrical field strength and harmonic strength, while EU regulations are based on duty cycle and maximum transmission power. A common misconception is the presence of a common 1% duty cycle, while in fact the duty cycle is frequency band-specific and can be loosened under certain circumstances. This paper clarifies the various regulations for the European region, the parties involved in drafting and enforcing regulation, and the impact on recent technologies such as SigFox, LoRaWAN, and DASH7. Furthermore, an overview is given of potential mitigation approaches to cope with the duty cycle constraints, as well as future research directions

Analysis of Bidirectional ADR-Enabled Class B LoRaWAN Networks in Industrial Scenarios

[EN] Low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies are becoming a widespread solution for wireless deployments in many applications, such as smart cities or Industry 4.0. However, there are still challenges to be addressed, such as energy consumption and robustness. To characterize and optimize these types of networks, the authors have developed an optimized use of the adaptative data rate (ADR) mechanism for uplink, proposed its use also for downlink based on the simulator ns-3, and then defined an industrial scenario to test and validate the proposed solution in terms of packet loss and energy.The research leading to these results received funding from the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission under Grant Agreement No. 825631 "Zero Defect Manufacturing Platform (ZDMP)". It was also partially supported by the MCyU (Spanish Ministry of Science and Universities) under the project ATLAS (PGC2018-094151-B-I00).Todoli Ferrandis, D.; Silvestre-Blanes, J.; Sempere Paya, VM.; Planes, A. (2020). Analysis of Bidirectional ADR-Enabled Class B LoRaWAN Networks in Industrial Scenarios. Applied Sciences. 10(22):1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10227964S1171022Ayoub, W., Samhat, A. E., Nouvel, F., Mroue, M., & Prevotet, J.-C. (2019). Internet of Mobile Things: Overview of LoRaWAN, DASH7, and NB-IoT in LPWANs Standards and Supported Mobility. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 21(2), 1561-1581. doi:10.1109/comst.2018.2877382Zero Defect Manufacturing Platformhttps://www.zdmp.eu/Finnegan, J., Brown, S., & Farrell, R. (2018). Evaluating the Scalability of LoRaWAN Gateways for Class B Communication in ns-3. 2018 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN). doi:10.1109/cscn.2018.8581759Luvisotto, M., Tramarin, F., Vangelista, L., & Vitturi, S. (2018). On the Use of LoRaWAN for Indoor Industrial IoT Applications. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2018, 1-11. doi:10.1155/2018/3982646Kim, S., & Yoo, Y. (2018). Contention-Aware Adaptive Data Rate for Throughput Optimization in LoRaWAN. Sensors, 18(6), 1716. doi:10.3390/s18061716Ta, D.-T., Khawam, K., Lahoud, S., Adjih, C., & Martin, S. (2019). LoRa-MAB: A Flexible Simulator for Decentralized Learning Resource Allocation in IoT Networks. 2019 12th IFIP Wireless and Mobile Networking Conference (WMNC). doi:10.23919/wmnc.2019.8881393Abdelfadeel, K. Q., Cionca, V., & Pesch, D. (2018). Fair Adaptive Data Rate Allocation and Power Control in LoRaWAN. 2018 IEEE 19th International Symposium on «A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks» (WoWMoM). doi:10.1109/wowmom.2018.8449737ns-3 Model Library, Online Resourcehttps://www.nsnam.org/doxygen/classns-3_1_1_hybrid_buildings_propagation_loss_model.html#detailsCode Repositoryhttps://github.com/dtodoli/ns3_lorawan_wor

A fair channel hopping scheme for LoRa Networks with multiple single-channel gateways

LoRa is one of the most prominent LPWAN technologies due to its suitable characteristics for supporting large-scale IoT networks, as it offers long-range communications at low power consumption. The latter is granted mainly because end-nodes transmit directly to the gateways and no energy is spent in multi-hop transmissions. LoRaWAN gateways can successfully receive simultaneous transmissions on multiple channels. However, such gateways can be costly when compared to simpler single-channel LoRa transceivers, and at the same time they are configured to operate with pure-ALOHA, the well-known and fragile channel access scheme used in LoRaWAN. This work presents a fair, control-based channel hopping-based medium access scheme for LoRa networks with multiple single-channel gateways. Compared with the pure-ALOHA used in LoRaWAN, the protocol proposed here achieves higher goodput and fairness levels because each device can choose its most appropriate channel to transmit at a higher rate and spending less energy. Several simulation results considering different network densities and different numbers of single-channel LoRa gateways show that our proposal is able to achieve a packet delivery ratio (PDR) of around 18% for a network size of 2000 end-nodes and one gateway, and a PDR of almost 50% when four LoRa gateways are considered, compared to 2% and 6%, respectively, achieved by the pure-ALOHA approachinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

LoRa 네트워크에서 에너지 효율성을 위한 노드 기반 ADR 메커니즘

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. 김종권.Recently, as Internet of Things (IoT) systems have increased and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been expanding, studies related to them are increasing. Among them, the interest in long range communication technologies has increased. In this regard, Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network technologies such as Long Range (LoRa), Weightless, and Sigfox have emerged. Also, various studies related to LoRa and LoRaWAN, which are available in Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands, are being conducted. In LoRa networks, the nodes are connected to the gateway by one hop to form a start topology. LoRa nodes use the transmission parameters such as Spreading Factor (SF), Transmission Power (TP), Bandwidth (BW), Coding Rate (CR), and Carrier Frequency (CF) to transmit frames. In this process, the frame losses and the collisions between frames may occur because of the channel condition and transmission timing. To alleviate this problem, LoRaWAN utilizes the ADR mechanism to select appropriate transmission parameters considering the channel condition on the node side. In addition, there is the ADR mechanism for allocating the transmission parameters on the server side. The ADR mechanisms maintain the connection between the server and the nodes, and set appropriate transmission parameters. However, these existing ADR mechanisms have some limitations. First, the server side ADR mechanism increases the overhead of the server in proportion to the transmitted frames. Second, it is difficult to quickly and efficiently respond to dynamic channel. Third, the transmission parameters selected by these ADR mechanisms may not be the optimal transmission parameters for energy efficiency. These problems cause large energy consumption of the battery-powered nodes and decrease performance when the channel condition changes dynamically. In this paper, we propose a Node-based ADR Mechanism (NbADR), which is the ADR mechanism for Class A nodes in confirmed mode to minimize the server load and maximize energy efficiency. The proposed mechanism responds quickly to the channel condition based on the downlink pattern and selects the transmission parameters for efficient energy consumption by utilizing Efficiency of Energy (EoE) metric. We analyze the efficiency of the transmission parameters selected through EoE, and conduct extensive experiments. In conclusion, NbADR is more effective in terms of energy efficiency than the existing ADR mechanisms. Additionally, NbADR guarantees throughput of LoRa networks even in dynamically changing channel environments and improves fairness between the nodes.최근 IoT 시스템이 증가하고 무선 센서 네트워크가 넓어지면서 이와 관련된 연구가 증가하고 있다. 그 중에서도 장거리 통신 기술에 대한 관심이 증가하고 있다. 이와 관련하여 LoRa, Weightless, Sigfox와 같은 LPWA네트워크 기술들이 등장하고 있다. 또한, ISM 밴드에서 사용 가능한 LoRa와 LoRaWAN 관련 다양한 연구가 진행되고 있다. LoRa 네트워크에서 노드들은 스타 토폴로지를 구성하기 위하여 게이트웨이와 1홉으로 연결되어 있다. LoRa 노드들은 프레임을 전송하기 위하여 SF, TP, BW, CR, CF와 같은 전송 파라미터를 사용한다. 이 과정에서 채널 상태와 전송 타이밍으로 인한 프레임 손실과 프레임 간 충돌이 발생할 수 있다. 이러한 문제를 완화하기 위하여 LoRaWAN에서는 노드 측에서 네트워크 상황을 고려하여 적절한 전송 파라미터를 선택하기 위한 ADR 메커니즘을 사용한다. 게다가 서버 측에서 전송 파라미터를 할당하는 ADR 메커니즘이 존재한다. ADR 메커니즘들은 서버와 노드의 연결을 유지하고 적절한 전송 파라미터를 설정한다. 하지만 기존의 ADR 메커니즘들은 일부 한계점을 가지고 있다. 첫 번째, 서버 측 ADR 메커니즘은 전송하는 프레임에 비례하여 서버의 부하를 증가시킨다. 두 번째, 동적인 채널에서 빠르고 효율적으로 대처하기 어렵다. 세 번째, 이러한 ADR 메커니즘들에서 선택된 전송 파라미터들이 에너지 효율성을 위한 최적의 전송 파라미터가 아닐 수 있다. 이러한 문제점들은 배터리로 동작하는 노드들의 큰 에너지 소모를 야기하고 LoRa 네트워크의 채널이 동적으로 변경되는 환경에서 성능을 감소시킨다. 본 논문에서 우리는 서버의 부하를 최소화하며 에너지 효율성을 최대화하는 노드 기반의 ADR 메커니즘인 NbADR을 제안한다. 제안하는 메커니즘은 노드 측에서 전송 받은 다운링크 패턴을 기반으로 채널 상황에 빠르게 대응하고, Efficiency of Energy (EoE) 메트릭을 활용하여 효율적인 에너지 소모를 위한 전송 파라미터를 선택한다. 우리는 EoE 기반으로 선택한 전송 파라미터의 효율성을 분석하고, 광범위한 실험을 진행한다. 결론적으로, NbADR은 기존의 ADR 메커니즘들과 비교하여 에너지 효율성 측면에서 효과적이다. 추가적으로, NbADR은 급격하게 변화하는 채널 환경에서LoRa 네트워크의 처리량을 보장하고 노드 간 공평성을 향상시킨다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Related Work 4 Chapter 3 Preliminaries 7 3.1 LoRa/LoRaWAN 7 3.2 Transmission Parameters 8 3.3 ADR Mechanism 9 Chapter 4 Channel Modeling 10 4.1 Loss 10 4.2 Collision 12 Chapter 5 Node-based ADR Mechanism 14 5.1 Approach for Energy Efficiency 15 5.2 Node-based ADR Mechanism (NbADR) 17 Chapter 6 Evaluation 21 6.1 Simulation Settings 22 6.2 Simulation Results 23 Chapter 7 Conclusion 33 Bibliography 35Maste

An efficient adaptive data-link-layer architecture for LoRa networks

LoRa is one of the most popular low-power wireless network technologies for implementation of the Internet of Things, with the advantage of providing long-range communication, but lower data rates, when compared with technologies such as Zigbee or Bluetooth. LoRa is a single-channel physical layer technology on top of which LoRaWAN implements a more complex multi-channel network with enhanced functionalities, such as adaptive data rate. However, LoRaWAN relies on expensive hardware to support these functionalities. This paper proposes a LoRa data-link-layer architecture based on a multi-layer star network topology that adapts relevant LoRa parameters for each end node dynamically taking into account its link distance and quality in order to balance communication range and energy consumption. The developed solution is comprised of multiple components, including a LoRa parameter calculator to help the user to configure the network parameters, a contention-free MAC protocol to avoid collisions, and an adaptive spreading factor and transmission power mechanism. These components work together to ensure a more efficient use of the chosen ISM band and end node resources, but with low-cost implementation and operation requirements.This research was funded by FEDER through COMPETE2020—Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) grant number POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028247 and by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/202

Energy Efficient Uplink Transmissions in LoRa Networks

LoRa has been recognized as one of the most promising low-power wide-area (LPWA) techniques. Since LoRa devices are usually powered by batteries, energy efficiency (EE) is an essential consideration. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficient resource allocation in LoRa networks to maximize the system EE (SEE) and the minimal EE (MEE) of LoRa users, respectively. Specifically, our objective is to maximize the corresponding EE by jointly exploiting user scheduling, spreading factor (SF) assignment, and transmit power allocations. To solve them efficiently, we first propose a suboptimal algorithm, including the low-complexity user scheduling scheme based on matching theory and the heuristic SF assignment approach for LoRa users scheduled on the same channel. Then, to deal with the power allocation, an optimal algorithm is proposed to maximize the SEE. To maximize the MEE of LoRa users assigned to the same channel, an iterative power allocation algorithm based on the generalized fractional programming and sequential convex programming is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed user scheduling algorithm achieves near-optimal EE performance, and the proposed power allocation algorithms outperform the benchmarks. © 2020 IEEE

Minimum throughput maximization in LoRa networks powered by ambient energy harvesting

In this paper, we investigate the uplink transmissions in low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) where the users are self-powered by the energy harvested from the ambient environment. Demonstrating their potential in supporting diverse Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, we focus on long range (LoRa) networks where the LoRa users are using the harvested energy to transmit data to a gateway via different spreading codes. Precisely, we study the throughput fairness optimization problem for LoRa users by jointly optimizing the spreading factor (SF) assignment, energy harvesting (EH) time duration, and the transmit power of LoRa users. First, through examination of the various permutations of collisions among users, we derive a general expression of the packet collision time between LoRa users, which depends on the SFs and EH duration requirements. Then, after reviewing prior SF allocation work, we develop two types of algorithms that either assure fair SF assignment indeed purposefully `unfair' allocation schemes for the LoRa users. Our results unearth three new findings. Firstly, we demonstrate that, to maximize the minimum rate, the unfair SF allocation algorithm outperforms the other approaches. Secondly, considering the derived expression of packet collision between simultaneous users, we are now able to improve the performance of the minimum rate of LoRa users and show that it is protected from inter-SF interference which occurs between users with different SFs. That is, imperfect SF orthogonality has no impact on minimum rate performance. Finally, we have observed that co-SF interference is the main limitation in the throughput performance, and not the energy scarcity