Examining Carrier Sense Multiple Access to Enhance LoRa IoT Network Performance for Smart City Applications

Low Power Wide Area Network technology is a promising solution to realize dense network deployment. Among those technologies, Long Range (LoRa) stands out and is actively being deployed worldwide. The key to its wide-spread is that it is designed from bottom up to optimize battery lifetime, capacity, long communication range and cost. Hence, this makes LoRaWAN an excellent choice for a massive portion of IoT applications deployed in smart cities. LoRaWAN adopts a fairly simple Aloha-Like MAC protocol which simplifies the network operation and preserves battery lifetime. However, the un-synchronized transmission fashion degrades the network throughput as the traffic load increases. Therefore, we investigate the performance and limitations of using a more advanced MAC protocol such as CSMA. We ran several simulation campaigns. First, conventional LoRaWAN network performance is analyzed. Then, introducing a new aspect to the proposition of CSMA in LoRa networks, we inspect the limitations of an end-device’s sensing range upon the development of the suggested CSMA/CA variant. Finally, we examine the network performance enhancement experienced when using a more advanced protocol such as CSMA for several realistic smart cities IoT applications deployment.