Emergency Communication in IoT Scenarios by Means of a Transparent LoRaWAN Enhancement

Abstract

This work deals with the management of sporadic and rare events linked with emergency situations in wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios. The goal is to increase the performance of the emergency communication, when low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) are used as IoT backbone. In the proposed approach, a device usually operates as a normal node but, in case of emergency, can use the novel LoRa-REP access method. In this work, the LoRa-REP, based on message replication, is discussed focusing on its capability of reducing average transaction time and increasing success probability. Two operational paradigms have been considered and tested: public LoRaWAN infrastructure with cloud-based backend, and private LoRaWAN networks with local backend (edge/fog computing). Typical examples of public networks are smart cities, whereas local networks are often used in industry or building automation. Additionally, two real use cases (for public and local scenarios) are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results (with a prototype device implementing LoRa-REP and named eNode) show that the success probability of the emergency communication can be increased up to 99.5%, and the average transaction time can be reduced up to 15% with respect to LoRaWAN without retries or up to 50% with respect to LoRaWAN with retries.