Enabling Blind Area Coverage for the Smart Grids: Integrating Energy-efficient LoRa Technologies in the 5G

Abstract

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G will open a range of innovations for the deployment of enhanced sensing and novel applications, controlling and interactive systems. The current smart grid (SG) will be more reliable, secure, flexible and durable by implementing 5GIoT monitoring. However, 5GIoT, is inefficiently and costly to travel over large areas and penetrate physical structures. As a complement, the proposed 5G1oRa converged network can offer a low-cost and large scale of coverage without blind areas. There are notable concerns regarding certain energy conservation issues to be overcome in order to achieve a successful integration of multi-hop LoRa systems within 5G architectures. Based on the Charnes-Cooper transform and Lagrange Multiplier iteration algorithm, a non-convex relaxation optimization is proposed to allocate transmit power for multi-hop LoRa to further maximize the system energy efficiency. The solution has been deployed, implemented and validated in a real and integrated 5GLoRa testbed, showing its feasibility to meet the requirements of SG data collection, transmission, cloud storage, and calculation in a wide area. Simulation results also validate the efficiency of our proposed model, which significantly outperforms other benchmark algorithms in terms of energy efficiency and QoS requirements.