Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Multi-hop Communication in LPWAN

Abstract

Nowadays, the low-power long-range networks are required for the Internet of Things applications, in which devices can transmit data over long distances and consume low energy. Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) have emerged to focus on a group of networks providing solutions for long-range communication and saving power consumption. However, most such networks rely on star topology networks, where the end nodes send data directly to the gateway, which leads to an issue when many nodes are far from the gateway. Aiming for no need for additional gateways, we consider multi-hop communication in LPWANs in this paper. Routing protocols are used to help some nodes that can become relay nodes and find the optimal route to forward the data to the gateway. In the simulated LoRa network, we evaluated the routing protocols in considering the delivery latency and packet loss ratio in varying the network size and number of nodes. Also, the results bring an insight into the future design of a multi-hop communication supported in LPWANs.

Publication
In International Conference on Next Generation Wired/Wireless Networking

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