Performance of Extended LoRaEnergySim Simulator in supporting Multi-Gateway scenarios and Interference Management

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) growth is exponential and it is providing a massive impact on our lives. It gives the ability to connect any kind of wireless device in a network. The distance between devices can change from a few centimeters to many kilometers. For wide-ranging coverage we need to use Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), and new IoT technologies are emerging such as LoRa. This technology enables energy-efficient wireless communication over exceptionally long distances. In order to be able to evaluate the performance of this type of network, new simulators implementing this technology are increasingly emerging; in fact, several tools and simulators for LoRa technology can already be found online. Of course, there is no simulator that gives the possibility to evaluate the whole protocol stack, but there are different implementations that allow to evaluate different features. This paper has considered the LoRaEnergySim-simulator, written in Python Programming language. It allows the setting up of a simple LoRa network, with a single Gateway (GTW). However, in this paper an extension to the Multi-GTW scenario is presented. This extended-version will support also other features, such as the imperfect SF’s orthogonality and new statistics at device and network levels. Moreover, a performance analysis considering the computational cost when using a Single-GTW or Multi-GTW network will be shown.