Design Considerations and Performance Evaluation of Gossip Routing in LoRa-Based Linear Networks

Abstract

Linear networks (sometimes called chain-type networks) occur frequently in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where sensors or actuators are deployed along pipelines, roads, railways, mines, and international borders. LoRa, short for Long Range, is an increasingly important technology for the IoT with great potential for linear networking. Despite its potential, limited research has explored LoRa’s implementation in such networks. In this paper, we addressed two important issues related to LoRa linear networks. The first is contention, when multiple nodes attempt to access a shared channel. Although originally designed to deal with interference, LoRa’s technique of synchronisation with a transmission node permits a novel approach to contention, which we explored. The second issue revolves around routing, where linear networks permit simpler strategies, in contrast to the common routing complexities of mesh networks. We present gossip routing as a very lightweight approach to routing. All our evaluations were carried out using real equipment by developing real networks. We constructed networks of up to three hops in length and up to three nodes in width. We carried out experiments looking at contention and routing. We demonstrate using the novel approach that we could achieve up to 98% throughput. We compared its performance considering collocated scenarios that achieved 84% and 89% throughputby using relay widths of two and three at each hop, respectively. Lastly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of gossip routing by using various transmission probabilities. We noticed high performance up to 98% throughputat Tprob = 0.90 and Tprob = 0.80 by employing two and three active relay nodes, respectively. The experimental result showed that, at Tprob = 0.40, it achieved an average performance of 62.8% and 73.77% by using two and three active relay nodes, respectively. We concluded that LoRa is an excellent technology for Internet of Things applications where sensors and actuators are deployed in an approximately linear fashion.