Development and analysis of new implementations of MAC proto-cols and mobility models in LoRa networks

Abstract

The technological revolution known as Internet of Things (IoT) brings together several areas of science and technology, such as data acquisition, energy consumption, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), data analyses and processing among others. IoT gets its name from the several applications, from wearables to cars connected to the network, spanning the transportation, health, electronics, water, and electricity industries. This massive addition of LoRa devices for its own application brings the problems of a shared medium such as frame collision. Additionally, as the devices are often battery powered there is a need to analyze the battery consumption. It was found that there is a lack of tools to estimate the consumption and performance of a network. In this paper, we implement new medium access control mechanisms for LoRaSim simulator, based on CSMA/CAD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance and Detection). This addition tests the influence a different access protocol has on the LoRa network and its resilience. As part of this study the new access protocol is built on the existing simulator LoRaSim to study the difference between the access protocol currently used in LoRa, an ALOHA protocol variant, CSMA/CA (CSMA with Collision Avoidance) and CSMA/CAD with the purpose of analyzing the difference in collision between protocols and the respective energy consumption in mobility scenarios.