A Novel Autonomous Time-Slotted LoRa MAC Protocol with Adaptive Frame Sizes

Alahamadi, Hanan; Bouabdallah, Fatma; Al-Dubai, Ahmed; Ghaleb, Baraq

Abstract

Time-Slotted Medium Access Control protocols bring advantages to the scalability of LoRa networks as an alternative to the ALOHA access method. However, such Time-Slotted protocols require nodes synchronization and schedules dissemination under stringent duty cycles likely resulting in improper performance and limited scalability. One possible solution is to adopt decentralized approaches where nodes autonomously determine their schedules and other transmission parameters. Thus, this paper proposes a novel Time-Slotted MAC protocol, named Autonomous Adaptive Frame Size (AAFS-LoRa) protocol, that allows nodes to individually determine their transmission parameters without extensive downlink transmissions from the gateway. The proposed protocol can configure nodes by maintaining information, such as their location and the gateway location. The main contribution of the proposed protocol is the adoption of adaptive frame sizes that are large enough to accommodate nodes with common transmission parameters to mitigate collisions among them. The proposed protocol has been investigated under different operating conditions, and the experiments demonstrates that our protocol can effectively improve the network performance, in terms of latency as well as the capacity.

Citation

Alahamadi, H., Bouabdallah, F., Al-Dubai, A., & Ghaleb, B. (2023, June). A Novel Autonomous Time-Slotted LoRa MAC Protocol with Adaptive Frame Sizes. Presented at International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2023), Marrakesh, Morocco

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2023)
• Start Date: Jun 19, 2023
• End Date: Jun 22, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jul 21, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 21, 2023
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 917-922
• Book Title: 2023 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)
• ISBN: 979-8-3503-3339-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC58020.2023.10182638
• Keywords: LoRaWAN, IoT, TDMA, MAC protocol