Outage probability and base station coverage in low power wide area networks

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical model for the uplink performance analysis of low power wide area (LPWA) networks. Such networks typically serve for data aggregation in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication scenarios. Our model predicts the outage probability of desired radio nodes and is based on the inversion of the moment-generating function of a suitable defined random variable. Due to the peculiarities of LPWA networks, namely low access probabilities and static channel conditions, the numerical inversion is not a trivial task, and we propose the use of a special inversion algorithm to address this problem. The applicability of the proposed model is demonstrated for an exemplary network topology with a latency constraint. We obtain optimum medium access probabilities for either maximized network coverage area or a trade-off between coverage and power consumption.