Mobility-aware resource assignment to IoT applications in long-range wide area networks

Abstract

The long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) has recently emerged as one of the most potential technologies for the mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In a LoRaWAN, the network-managed adaptive data rate (ADR) method is responsible for managing resource allocation (i.e., spreading factor (SF) and transmit power (TP)) to end-devices (EDs) through ADR commands. When an ED is mobile and receives a new configuration (i.e., SF and TP) from the network server, the propagation scenario could have been dramatically changed. Hence, the SF and the link budget will no longer be valid, which results in packet loss and massive retransmissions. Therefore, we propose a mobility-aware resource (SF) assignment scheme (M-ASFA), which aims to allocate the best SF to IoT-enabled mobile EDs at each uplink transmission by considering the strength of the signals that a gateway receives from the EDs. The simulation results demonstrate that, in our proposed M-ASFA solution, the SF is assigned to mobile EDs by proactively responding to the mobility of the EDs. This proactive behavior of the proposed scheme enhances the packet success ratio by significantly reducing the impact of interference, retransmissions, and packet loss when compared with the LoRaWAN-based ADR.