Improving Channel Utilization of LoRaWAN by using Novel Channel Access Mechanism

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology has been widely adopted in different Internet-of-things (IoT) services. Long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) is an evolution of wireless sensor network (WSN) directed to IoT concept, mostly used in private outdoor applications. The existing LoRaWAN operates following the simple ALOHA standards. Therefore, it suffers from high packet loss and supports a very limited number of nodes. For the application of LoRaWAN in dense networks, an efficient channel access mechanism is required in order to improve the efficiency and robustness. In this paper, we investigate a modified listen-before-talk (LBT) mechanism. Specifically, we propose LoRa-BED, LoRa-BEB and LoRa-BEH, channel access protocols to reduce collisions in high density environment. Our results demonstrate that the proposed protocols significantly improve the channel utilization and efficiency with a slight increase in energy per device while sensing the channel.