IRONWAN: increasing reliability of overlapping networks in LoRaWAN
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Bhatia, laksh
Chen, Po-Yu
Breza, Michael
Zhao, Cong
McCann, Julie
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
LoRaWAN deployments follow an ad-hoc deployment model that has organically led to overlapping communication networks, sharing the wireless spectrum, and completely unaware of each other. LoRaWAN uses ALOHA-style communication where it is almost impossible to schedule transmission between networks belonging to different owners properly. The inability to schedule overlapping networks will cause inter-network interference, which will increase node-to-gateway message losses and gateway-to-node acknowledgement failures. This problem is likely to get worse as the number of LoRaWAN networks increase. In response to this problem, we propose IRONWAN, a wireless overlay network that shares communication resources without modifications to underlying protocols. It utilises the broadcast nature of radio communication and enables gateway-to-gateway communication to facilitate the search for failed messages and transmit failed acknowledgements already received and cached in overlapping network’s gateways. IRONWAN uses two novel algorithms, a Real-time Message Inter-arrival Predictor, to highlight when a server has not received an expected uplink message. The Interference Predictor ensures that extra gateway-to-gateway communication does not negatively impact communication bandwidth. We evaluate IRONWAN on a 1000-node simulator with up to ten gateways and a 10-node testbed with 2-gateways. Results show that IRONWAN can achieve up to 12% higher packet delivery ratio (PDR) and total messages received per node while increasing the minimum PDR by up to 28%. These improvements save up to 50% node’s energy. Finally, we demonstrate that IRONWAN has comparable performance to an optimal solution (wired, centralised) but with 2-32 times lower communication costs. IRONWAN also has up to 14% better PDR when compared to FLIP, a wired-distributed gateway-to-gateway protocol in certain scenarios.
Date Issued
2021-11-08
Date Acceptance
2021-11-01
Citation
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021, 9 (13), pp.10763-10776
ISSN
2327-4662
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
10763
End Page
10776
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Volume
9
Issue
13
Copyright Statement
© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Lloyds Register Foundation
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9606195
Grant Number
PO 20256862
ATIPO000005051
2033180
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Information Systems
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Telecommunications
Computer Science
Engineering
Logic gates
Servers
Uplink
Downlink
Wireless communication
Interference
Internet of Things
LoRaWAN
multiowner
overlapping
reliability
cs.NI
cs.NI
cs.SY
eess.SY
0805 Distributed Computing
1005 Communications Technologies
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-11-13