Impacts of Multi-Hop Routing and Channel/Transmission Configuration Planning on LoRa Networks

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (M.Sc.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical Engineering

Grantor

University of Saskatchewan

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Paul, Biswajit 1987-

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Bui, Francis
• Nguyen, Ha

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kakri, Rajesh
• Dinh, Anh
• Makaroff, Dwight

• multi-hop routing, channel/transmit configuration-planning

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10388/11835

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:harvest.usask.ca:10388/11835