Impacts of Multi-Hop Routing and Channel/Transmission Configuration Planning on LoRa Networks
Date
2019-01-28
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0001-9199-5696
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) has gathered tremendous industrial momentum over the last few
years and many applications have emerged to support the market demand. Low-Power Wide-Area
Networks (LPWANs) promise a great future for low-cost, long-range wireless communication
networks that typically serve low data rate applications. Furthermore, given the huge connectivity
demand arising from the IoT sector, LPWANs are more suitable than existing wireless
technologies such as cellular and wireless local area networks. Among several proprietary
technologies that fall in the category of LPWANs, LoRa has a very good potential to become a
long-lasting technology, thanks to its gigantic industrial support base. LoRa Alliance, an
organization consisting of more than 500 member companies (as of October, 2018) is promoting
this technology.
In this thesis, LoRa technology is examined and a special attention is given to routing.
Although single-hop routing is currently adopted in LoRaWAN, an open network protocol
developed by the LoRa Alliance for LoRa transmission technology, multi-hop routing has the
potential to be introduced in the future version of LoRaWAN. Node energy efficiency and network
lifetime are considered to be among the most important network requirements for LPWANs. Since
multi-hop routing provides more flexibility over single-hop routing, developing suitable multi-hop
routing schemes for LoRa networks to improve energy efficiency is the primary focus of this
research. Findings suggest that with the proposed multi-hop routing scheme, significant energy
savings can be achieved when compared to single-hop routing. Network connectivity is given a
proper consideration and its impact on energy efficiency is also investigated.
Apart from routing, the effect of application-specific channel planning on top of
geographical channel planning given in the LoRaWAN Specifications and the effect of
transmission configuration planning on energy expenditure of nodes are examined. Nodes in a
LoRa network can utilize different transmission configurations and LoRaWAN supports a node to
adopt a suitable transmit power option. Results show that both proper channel planning and
transmission configuration planning can lead to substantial improvements in energy saving for
both single-hop routing and multi-hop routing schemes.
Description
Keywords
multi-hop routing, channel/transmit configuration-planning
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Program
Electrical Engineering