A TDMA-Based Access Protocol for Dense Networks with Moving Nodes for IoT Applications

Abstract

Low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies have gained popularity in accordance with the explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Among others, LoRa is considered as the leading standard that can meet the needs of modern wireless networking, mainly offering energy efficiency and broad coverage as well as a massive amount of device support. In addition to the ALOHA protocol, which is the default channel access mechanism used by the standard, a number of alternatives have been proposed in the literature in an effort to ameliorate the overall network performance. Furthermore, with moving nodes gaining ground more and more in the IoT realm and the research being at a relatively premature stage, it is imperative to create innovative algorithms that support highly dense networks with fast moving nodes. Motivated by these reasons, this work proposes a novel medium access protocol that takes advantage of the increased capabilities of modern wake up radio (WuR) technology in order to achieve low latency and mitigate the risk of lost packets in IoT networks with moving nodes based on the LoRa technology. A number of simulation scenarios have been devised and the findings suggest that the proposed protocol achieves the set goals and improves existing solutions.