No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we deliver a discussion regarding the role of Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) in the cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure to support massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) in next-generation wireless systems beyond 5G. We commence by presenting a performance analysis of current LPWAN systems, specifically LoRaWAN, in terms of coverage and throughput. The results obtained using analytic methods and network simulations are combined in the paper for getting a more comprehensive vision. Next, we identify possible performance bottlenecks, speculate on the characteristics of coming IoT applications, and seek to identify potential enhancements to the current technologies that may overcome the identified shortcomings.
In this paper we advocate the use of device-to-device (D2D) communications in a LoRaWAN Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN). After overviewing the critical features of the LoRaWAN technology, we discuss the pros and cons of enabling the D2D communications for it. Subsequently we propose a network-assisted D2D communications protocol and show its feasibility by implementing it on top of a LoRaWAN-certified commercial transceiver. The conducted experiments show the performance of the proposed D2D communications protocol and enable us to assess its performance. More precisely, we show that the D2D communications can reduce the time and energy for data transfer by 6 to 20 times compared to conventional LoRaWAN data transfer mechanisms. In addition, the use of D2D communications may have a positive effect on the network by enabling spatial re-use of the frequency resources. The proposed LoRaWAN D2D communications can be used for a wide variety of applications requiring high coverage, e.g. use cases in distributed smart grid deployments for management and trading.
Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of Low-power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) in the unlicensed band for various Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Due to the ultra-low transmission power and long transmission duration, LPWAN devices inevitably suffer from high power Cross Technology Interference (CTI), such as interference from Wi-Fi, coexisting in the same spectrum. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces the Partial Symbol Recovery (PSR) scheme for improving the CTI resilience of LPWAN. We verify our idea on LoRa, a widely adopted LPWAN technique, as a proof of concept. At the PHY layer, although CTI has much higher power, its duration is relatively shorter compared with LoRa symbols, leaving part of a LoRa symbol uncorrupted. Moreover, due to its high redundancy, LoRa chips within a symbol are highly correlated. This opens the possibility of detecting a LoRa symbol with only part of the chips. By examining the unique frequency patterns in LoRa symbols with time-frequency analysis, our design effectively detects the clean LoRa chips that are free of CTI. This enables PSR to only rely on clean LoRa chips for successfully recovering from communication failures. We evaluate our PSR design with real-world testbeds, including SX1280 LoRa chips and USRP B210, under Wi-Fi interference in various scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our design offers reliable packet recovery performance, successfully boosting the LoRa packet reception ratio from 45.2% to 82.2% with a performance gain of 1.8 times.
Despite the proliferation of mobile devices in various wide-area Internet of Things applications (e.g., smart city, smart farming), current Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) are not designed to effectively support mobile nodes. In this paper, we propose to handle mobility in SNOW (Sensor Network Over White spaces), an LPWAN that operates in the TV white spaces. SNOW supports massive concurrent communication between a base station (BS) and numerous low-power nodes through a distributed implementation of OFDM. In SNOW, inter-carrier interference (ICI) is more pronounced under mobility due to its OFDM based design. Geospatial variation of white spaces also raises challenges in both intra- and inter-network mobility as the low-power nodes are not equipped to determine white spaces. To handle mobility impacts on ICI, we propose a dynamic carrier frequency offset estimation and compensation technique which takes into account Doppler shifts without requiring to know the speed of the nodes. We also propose to circumvent the mobility impacts on geospatial variation of white space through a mobility-aware spectrum assignment to nodes. To enable mobility of the nodes across different SNOWs, we propose an efficient handoff management through a fast and energy-efficient BS discovery and quick association with the BS by combining time and frequency domain energy-sensing. Experiments through SNOW deployments in a large metropolitan city and indoors show that our proposed approaches enable mobility across multiple different SNOWs and provide robustness in terms of reliability, latency, and energy consumption under mobility.
The last few years have seen the proliferation of low-power wide area networks like LoRa, Sigfox and 802.11ah, each of which use a different and sometimes proprietary coding and modulation scheme, work below the noise floor and operate on the same frequency band. We introduce DeepSense, which is the first carrier sense mechanism that enables random access and coexistence for low-power wide area networks even when signals are below the noise floor. Our key insight is that any communication protocol that operates below the noise floor has to use coding at the physical layer. We show that neural networks can be used as a general algorithmic framework that can learn the coding mechanisms being employed by such protocols to identify signals that are hidden within noise. Our evaluation shows that DeepSense performs carrier sense across 26 different LPWAN protocols and configurations below the noise floor and can operate in the presence of frequency shifts as well as concurrent transmissions. Beyond carrier sense, we also show that DeepSense can support multi bit-rate LoRa networks by classifying between 21 different LoRa configurations and flexibly adapting bitrates based on signal strength. In a deployment of a multi-rate LoRa network, DeepSense improves bit rate by 4x for nearby devices and provides a 1.7x increase in the number of locations that can connect to the campus-wide network.
Recent advances in Low-Power Wide-Area Networks have mitigated interference by using cloud assistance. Those methods transmit the RSSI samples and corrupted packets to the cloud to restore the correct message. However, the effectiveness of those methods is challenged by the high transmission data amount. This paper presents a novel method for interference mitigation in a Edge-Cloud collaborative manner, namely ECCR. It does not require transmitting RSSI sample any more, whose length is eight times of the packets. We demonstrate the disjointness of the bit errors of packets at the base stations via real-word experiments. ECCR leverages this to collaborate with multiple base stations for error recovery. Each base station detects and reports bit error locations to the cloud, then both error checking code and interfered packets from other receivers are utilized to restore correct packets. ECCR takes the advantages of both the global management ability of the cloud and the signal to perceive the benefit of each base station, and it is applicable to deployed LP-WAN systems (e.g. sx1280) without any extra hardware requirement. Experimental results show that ECCR is able to accurately decode packets when packets have nearly 51.76% corruption.