DSME-LoRa: Seamless Long-range Communication between Arbitrary Nodes in the Constrained IoT

Abstract

Long-range radio communication is preferred in many IoT deployments, as it avoids the complexity of multi-hop wireless networks. LoRa is a popular, energy-efficient wireless modulation but its networking substrate LoRaWAN introduces severe limitations to its users. In this article, we present and thoroughly analyze DSME-LoRa, a system design of LoRa with IEEE 802.15.4 Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) as a MAC layer. DSME-LoRa offers the advantage of seamless client-to-client communication beyond the pure gateway-centric transmission of LoRaWAN. We evaluate its feasibility via a full-stack implementation on the popular RIOT operating system, assess its steady-state packet flows in an analytical stochastic Markov model, and quantify its scalability in massive communication scenarios using large-scale network simulations. Our findings indicate that DSME-LoRa is indeed a powerful approach that opens LoRa to standard network layers and outperforms LoRaWAN in many dimensions.