Towards More Energy Efficient MAC protocols for LoRaWAN Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is currently one of the most trending research topic. Many wireless network technologies, called LPWAN (low power wide area network), have been developed with low-power, long-range and low-throughput in mind. It is estimated that there will be over 50 billion connected devices in these LPWAN networks. This paper focuses on Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol of LPWAN networks to evaluate the scalability and energy consumption performances. More precisely, we compare the two well-known MAC protocols, namely pure Aloha and slotted Aloha. First, we define two performances indicators such as the Data Extraction Rate (DER) and the Network Energy Consumption (NEC). Then we simulate a typical LoRaWAN networks based on the LoRaSim simulator. The results show that the slotted Aloha protocol is more efficient than the pure Aloha protocol in terms of energy consumption.