Long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) is an energy-efficient and inexpensive networking technology that is rapidly being adopted for many Internet-of-Things applications. In this study, we perform extensive measurements on a new LoRaWAN deployment to characterise the spatio-temporal properties of the LoRaWAN channel. Our experiments reveal that LoRaWAN frames are mostly lost due to the channel effects, which are adverse when the end-devices are mobile. The frame losses are up to 70 percent, which can be bursty for both mobile and stationary scenarios. Frame losses result in data losses since the frames are transmitted only once in the basic configuration. To reduce data losses in LoRaWAN, we design a novel coding scheme for data recovery called DaRe that works on the application layer. DaRe combines techniques from convolutional and fountain codes. By implementing DaRe, we show that 99 percent of the data can be recovered with a code rate of 1/2 when the frame loss is up to 40 percent. Compared to the repetition coding scheme, DaRe provides 21 percent higher data recovery and can save up to 42 percent of the energy consumed on a transmission for 10-byte data units. We also show that DaRe provides better resilience to bursty frame losses.

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High frame-corruption is widely observed in Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) due to the coexistence with other networks in ISM bands and an Aloha-like MAC layer. LoRa's Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanism is often insufficient to retrieve corrupted data. In fact, reallife measurements show that at least one-fourth of received transmissions are corrupted. When more frames are dropped, LoRa nodes usually switch over to higher spreading factors (SF), thus increasing transmission times and increasing the required energy. This paper introduces ReDCoS, a novel coding technique at the application layer that improves recovery of corrupted LoRa frames, thus reducing the overall transmission time and energy invested by LoRa nodes by several-fold. ReDCoS utilizes lightweight coding techniques to pre-encode the transmitted data. Therefore, the inbuilt Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) that follows is computed based on an already encoded data. At the receiver, we use both the CRC and the coded data to recover data from a corrupted frame beyond the built-in Error Correcting Code (ECC). We compare the performance of ReDCoS to (i) the standard FEC of vanilla-LoRaWAN, and to (ii) Reed Solomon (RS) coding applied as ECC to the data of LoRaWAN. The results indicated a 54x and 13.5x improvement of decoding ratio, respectively, when 20 data symbols were sent. Furthermore, we evaluated ReDCoS on-field using LoRa SX1261 transceivers showing that it outperformed RS-coding by factor of at least 2x (and up to 6x) in terms of the decoding ratio while consuming 38.5% less energy per correctly received transmission.

The electricity grid, using Information and Communication Technology, is transformed into Smart Grid (SG), which is highly efficient and responsive, promoting twoway energy and information flow between energy-distributors and consumers. Many consumers are becoming prosumers by also harvesting energy. The trend is to form small communities of consumers/prosumers, leading to Micro-grids (MG) to manage energy locally. MGs are parts of SG that decentralize the energy flow, allocating the excess of harvested energy within the community. Energy allocation amongst them must solve certain issues viz., 1) balancing supply/demand within MGs; 2) how allocating energy to a user affects his/her community; and 3) what are the economic benefits for users. To address these issues, we propose six Energy Allocation Strategies (EASs) for MGs -ranging from simple to optimal and their combinations. We maximize the usage of harvested energy within the MG. We form household-groups sharing similar characteristics to apply EASs by analyzing energy and socioeconomic data thoroughly. We propose four evaluation metrics and evaluate our EASs on data acquired from 443 households over a year. By prioritizing specific households, we increase the number of fully served households to 81% compared to random sharing. By combining EASs, we boost the social welfare parameter by 49%.

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Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) offer ubiquitous communications for The Internet of Things (IoT). However, there are many challenges in rolling out LoRaWAN -mainly scalability, energy efficiency, Packet Reception Ratio (PRR), and keeping the channel access as simple as unslotted ALOHA. To this end, we design non-persistent Capture Effect Channel Activity Detection Algorithm (𝑛𝑝-CECADA), which is a novel, distributed protocol for the MAC layer of LoRaWAN. It utilizes Channel Activity Detection (CAD), which is a built-in imperfect mechanism for channel sensing and minimal feedback from the gateways. In 𝑛𝑝-CECADA each device independently adapts backoff times based on the traffic in its vicinity and the transmission power based on the heuristically inferred probability of capturing the channel. To achieve this, first, we carried out an extensive on-field evaluation to measure the effectiveness of CAD and capture effect in LoRa. Using them we designed 𝑛𝑝-CECADA and developed ns-3 modules. Packet Reception Ratio of 𝑛𝑝-CECADA is 15.74× and 5.13× higher than vanilla LoRaWAN and 𝑝-CARMA, respectively. Channel utilization is 11.24× higher compared to LMAC. Further, on a testbed of 30 LoRa devices 𝑛𝑝-CECADA outperforms LoRaWAN up to 5 times.

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