Improving Delivery Ratio in LoRa Network

Abstract

The LoRa (Long Range) radio communication provides large coverage areas, low bandwidth, small data rates, and transmitting limited data sizes, with very low energy usage. Multiple transmission channels are used, but the number of channels available is fairly limited - e.g. 8 in most countries in Europe. The amount of interferences may be estimated by the continuous observation of the number of delivered packets and the received signal strength. We propose to aggregate and analyse those metrics per channel and geographical area. When the proportion of received packets per some of the areas decreases, it is subjected to heavier interferences than other parts of the network and should be used less intensively. Thus we propose to allocate the weights for each channel per geographic area and/or device, defining the probability of the channel usage. Furthermore, we created an algorithm that periodically updates the weights and a simulation model using OMNeT++, FloRa, taking into account possible packets collisions. The algorithm has been validated for both random and realistic network topologies. The simulation evaluations show a significant improvement in the package delivery efficiency, by almost 50% in scenarios with very high interference level simulated and by more than 13% in scenarios fed with real-life measurements of packet delivery probability changes in time.