DBM: Decentralized Burst Mitigation for Periodic LoRa Devices Using Self-Organizing Radio Access

The steady growth of IoT networks and the rise of LoRa and LoRaWAN as a wireless communication protocol in smart city deployments invoke the need for energy efficient and performance focused channel access mechanisms. Since LoRa makes use of the random access protocol ALOHA, the expected collision probability is directly related to the density of deployed IoT devices. In order to alleviate this scalability issue of LoRa deployments, and the energy losses caused by rising packet collisions, this work proposes a novel channel access mechanism that aims to mitigate high collision probabilities as a result of dense, bursty periods of transmissions, without the need for centralized control instances or dedicated control messages. Based on simulation results, we show that the proposed mechanism is able to mitigate between 30% and 100% of collisions compared to pure ALOHA, depending on factors such as system load and device density.