LoRaDrone: Enabling Low-Power LoRa Data Transmission via a Mobile Approach

Abstract

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are widely used to connect large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Long Range (LoRa) is a promising LPWAN technology sensitive to energy consumption, since LoRa nodes are generally battery-powered, and the battery life will influence the lifetime of the LoRa network. In practice, the battery life of LoRa nodes is short in many scenarios, due to the long transmission distance form the gateway leading to high energy consumption. Existing techniques for energy-efficient data transmission mainly focus on static gateways, and will consume huge energy of remote nodes. In this paper, we propose to integrate LoRa with mobility to minimize the energy consumption of nodes by effectively shortening the transmission distances, and design the first mobile LoRa data transmission system called LoRaDrone by leveraging the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) gateway flying close to nodes. Specifically, we present a low-power communication mechanism and a dynamic channel allocation policy to minimize the energy consumed in sensing and communicating with the UAV gateway, while considering the distinctive LoRa parallel reception and complex transmission collisions. Then, an optimal speed scheduling strategy is designed to ensure the reliability of data transmission, and minimize the energy consumption of the UAV. Evaluations on various scales verify the effectiveness of LoRaDrone under different nodes' distributions and UAV paths. Compared with the baselines, the energy consumption of nodes using LoRaDrone is at most reduced by $\mathbf{70.37}\times$ at 5000 nodes.