Transmission Sequencing to Improve LoRaWAN Performance

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a viable communication protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications which typically require a massive number of sensor nodes to collect and transmit data. Practically in LoRaWAN, a large area is covered with sensor nodes that have to share the same communication medium. Increasing number of nodes will potentially increase packet collision that will reduce the LoRaWaN performance. In this paper, we propose the sequencing transmission scheme for LoRaWAN. Each sensor node was allocated a time slot for packet transmission such that the time on-air (ToA) of a packet was always lower than the time slot. We analyzed the performance and demonstrated the efficacy of the sequencing transmission scheme using the LoRaSim simulator. The results showed that our scheme could provide up to 100% data extraction rate (DER) when the allocated time slot was sufficient for each node to transmit and provided an average of 5 - 10% increase in DER compared to the default LoRaWAN transmission scheme.