Abstract
The emergence of low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) as a new agent in the Internet of Things (IoT) will result in the incorporation into the digital world of low-automated processes from a wide variety of sectors. The single-hop conception of typical LPWAN deployments, though simple and robust, overlooks the self-organization capabilities of network devices, suffers from lack of scalability in crowded scenarios, and pays little attention to energy consumption. Aimed to take the most out of devices’ capabilities, the HARE protocol stack is proposed in this paper as a new LPWAN technology flexible enough to adopt uplink multi-hop communications when proving energetically more efficient. In this way, results from a real testbed show energy savings of up to 15% when using a multi-hop approach while keeping the same network reliability. System’s self-organizing capability and resilience have been also validated after performing numerous iterations of the association mechanism and deliberately switching off network devices.
Highlights
In the coming years, electronic equipment will be interconnected and almost every person and industry will become simultaneously data generators and consumers
Licensed spectrum Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) are deployed in the spectrum holdings of mobile operators and take advantage of cellular technologies to expand into new Internet of Things (IoT) usage scenarios, by providing improved support for low-cost and energy-efficient machine type communication (MTC) devices
IoT (NB-IoT), enhanced machine-type communication, and extended coverage GSM IoT (EC-GSM-IoT) are the initiatives emerging from the 3rd Generation Partnership
Summary
Electronic equipment will be interconnected and almost every person and industry will become simultaneously data generators and consumers. Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) are intended to become the engine of long-range, low-bandwidth IoT applications (see Figure 1), which until now have been constrained by deployment costs and power issues The goal of these networks is to deliver small amounts of data over long ranges, at rates of up to tens of kilobits per second (kbps), with a battery lifetime of up to several years, supporting thousands of devices connected to a base station, and facilitating online integration. LPWAN architecture is characteristically single-hop, where end devices are connected directly to the base station by following a star topology, greatly simplifying the network and endowing it with robustness and centralized control This single-hop massive channel access sets out some inherent challenges: reliability, scalability, flexibility, and quality of service (QoS).
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