Fairness-Aware Demodulator Allocation in LoRa Multi-Gateway Networks

Abstract

The literature has shown the drastic decrease of the achievable LoRa network throughput, due to the limited number of demodulators that are supported by LoRaWAN gateways. Unlike existing approaches, in this letter, we design fairness-aware algorithms under this stringent constraint. By taking the efficient demodulation time ratio as a fairness metric, our algorithms enable to prioritize frames with larger spreading factors, while increasing the total demodulation time thanks to collaboration among gateways. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed methods largely outperform LoRaWAN baselines, while closely approaching their performance upper bounds.