Low power radiolocation through long range wide area networks: A performance study

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technologies have recently triggered many research efforts and standardization activities due to the inherent possibility of both providing long range wireless communications and guaranteeing a long life for very cheap sensing devices. At the same time, the increasing interest of telco operators into such kind of networks is due to the wide range of applications that can be supported by LPWAN, including low power radiolocation. Among the available LPWAN access schemes, LoRaWAN protocols enable a hierarchical network structure over sub-gigahertz unlicensed spectra, with coordinated gateways listening for data delivered by battery-operated end-devices. A proper positioning scheme for gateways enables radiolocation duties through multilateration. However, the LoRaWAN Aloha-based capacity puts an implicit restriction on the radiolocation performances, while explicit duty cycle policies further limit the resource availability on unlicensed frequencies. To characterize the throughput of low power radiolocation applications, this contribution introduces a scalable and detailed probability model, while validating the same through a large simulation campaign. The results clearly show that the availability of multiple channel enhances the capacity of LoRaWAN networks while insuring predictable time delay between consecutive successful radiolocation events.