A New Distributed and Probabilistic Approach for Traffic Control in LPWANs

Abstract

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are wireless networks with very low power consumption and wide area coverage. They are capable of supporting the traffic of nearly a thousand nodes with a duty cycle of less than 1%. However, the gradual densification of nodes increases the number of collisions and makes it more difficult to manage the upstream traffic. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new distributed and probabilistic traffic control algorithm, DiPTC, which allows nodes to adapt their traffic according to the needs of the application (e.g., receiving K measurements over a time period) while being agnostic to the number of nodes and to the network topology. A control message is broadcast by the gateway to all nodes each period when the objective is not reached, so that nodes can re-adapt their traffic. We evaluate the proposed solution in simulation and we compare it with the LoRaWAN protocol. The results show that our algorithm is able to reach the objective while keeping a low number of collisions, with a longer network lifetime. Compared to LoRaWAN, our solution shows a three times increase in the success rate and a decrease by a factor of 10 in the collision rate. 1