A Thorough Study of LoRaWAN Performance Under Different Parameter Settings
LoRaWAN is an emerging low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology, which is gaining momentum thanks to its flexibility and ease of deployment. Conversely to other LPWAN solutions, LoRaWAN indeed permits the configuration of several network parameters that affect different network performance indexes, such as energy efficiency, fairness, and capacity, in principle making it possible to adapt the network behavior to the specific requirements of the application scenario. Unfortunately, the complex and sometimes elusive interactions among the different network components make it rather difficult to predict the actual effect of a certain parameters setting, so that flexibility can turn into a stumbling block if not deeply understood. In this article, we shed light on such complex interactions for a single gateway (GW) system by analyzing the effect of some built in features and configurations, including the GW's limitations in terms of duty cycle and the number of parallel reception paths, the number of allowed retransmissions for confirmed traffic, and the preconfigured data rate used in downlink transmissions. The simulation based analysis reveals various tradeoffs and highlights some inefficiencies in the design of the LoRaWAN standard. Furthermore, we show how significant performance gains can be obtained by wisely setting the system parameters, possibly in combination with some novel network management policies (e.g. enabling selective prioritization of downlink transmissions at the GW)
IEEE Internet of Things Journal