Traffic Control in Low Power Wide Area Networks

Résumé

Low-power, low data transmission rates, and long-range wireless networks, also known as Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), are designed to operate well with equipment that uses few resources and can be used for many years thanks to their long battery life operation. This type of network can handle traffic from nearly 1,000 nodes while maintaining a duty cycle of less than 1%. However, as node density grows, the number of collisions increases, mandating network traffic control, particularly in certain application scenarios that require a set of measurements per period. Additionally, for telecommunication companies providing LPWAN services, a lack of traffic management algorithms may lead to network congestion due to clients exceeding SLA (Service Level Agreement) data limits. Tackling these issues is imperative, as they are prone to become increasingly prevalent in LPWANs To tackle this concern, we propose a Distributed and Probabilistic Traffic Control algorithm (DiPTC) that allows nodes to adapt their traffic in response to the application requirements (e.g., acquiring K measurements over a period of time) while being agnostic about the number of nodes or the network topology. When this requirement is not achieved, the gateway sends a feedback message to all the nodes demanding them to modify their traffic. We compare our proposed solution to LoRaWAN (a typical LPWAN protocol) and a Centralized Optimal Traffic Control solution (COTraC). Unlike LoRaWAN, our algorithm successfully proved its efficiency by achieving the objective while minimizing collisions and extending the network lifetime thrice. We also examined the influence of DiPTC parameters on the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings indicate that selecting these parameter values involves balancing the success rate and network lifetime while considering the specific requirements of the application. Our initial proposal focused on a single-gateway LPWAN setup. To adjust DiPTC to a multi-gateway context, we introduce new feedback message transmission methods called synchronous mode and round-robin mode. In synchronous mode, all gateways simultaneously send the feedback message to the nodes within their coverage areas. Conversely, in the round-robin mode, only one gateway at a time transmits the feedback message to the nodes in its coverage area. In a nutshell, compared with the LoRaWAN multi-gateway setup, both synchronous DiPTC and round-robin DiPTC successfully achieve our objectives while reducing collision risks.

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