An on-line spreading factor allocation for a LoRaWAN network

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is an interesting network technology for building ultra low-power instances of the Internet of Things (IoT) and motivated a significant interest in the recent literature. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we devise a model to evaluate the performance of algorithms used for assigning the best "resource patterns" to transmit packets on the wireless interface of LoRa; to this end, we adopt a Spatial Point Process to model the distribution of nodes in the system and we apply such a model to derive, in a compact way, the performance of a Spreading Factor allocation mechanism proposed in the literature. A second contribution of the paper consists in the definition of a new metric to estimate the network performance and of a new protocol to dynamically improve the above assignment algorithm. Both the metric and the algorithm are based on a re-transmission mechanism. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.