LMAC: Efficient Carrier-Sense Multiple Access for LoRa
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2022 papers
Abstract
Current LoRa networks including those following the LoRaWAN specification use the primitive ALOHA mechanism for media access control due to LoRa’s lack of carrier sense capability. From our extensive measurements, the channel activity detection feature that was recently introduced to LoRa for energy-efficiently detecting preamble chirps can also detect payload chirps reliably. This sheds light on an efficient carrier-sense multiple access protocol that we refer to as LMAC for LoRa networks. This article presents the designs of three advancing versions of LMAC that respectively implement carrier-sense multiple access, and balance the communication loads among the channels defined by frequencies and spreading factors based on the end nodes’ local information and then additionally the gateway’s global information. Experiments on a 50-node lab testbed and a 16-node university deployment show that, compared with ALOHA, LMAC brings up to 2.2× goodput improvement and 2.4× reduction of radio energy per successfully delivered frame. Thus, should LoRaWAN’s ALOHA be replaced with LMAC, network performance boosts can be realized.
Related Papers
- → Stability and Throughput of Random Access With CS-Based MUD for MTC(2017)20 cited
- → On the stability and throughput of compressive random access in MTC(2017)6 cited
- → Performance Analysis of Random Access Algorithm Based on Power Capture(2005)3 cited
- → Performance analysis of random access algorithm based on power capture(2005)1 cited