Improving LoRa-REP scalability in emergency scenarios by means of slotted delay

Abstract

The LoRa-REP is transparent enhancement of LoRa W Anthat can effectively handle emergency transmissions caused by important, but sporadic, events. LoRa-REP is designed to shorten the average latency and reduce emergency communication failure probability using a message replication approach, suitable for Internet-of- Things (loT) applications. A hardware implementation and a proof-of-concept scenario are realized, together with a simulator. Previous experiments demonstrate feasibility, while scalability is shown being somehow limited especially if short transaction delay are needed. For this reason, this work proposes a comparative analysis of the pre-existing LoRa-REP scalability and, for the first time, customizes standards slotted delay strategies to the specific LoRA-REP scenarios. The simulation considers up to 10 co-located LoRa-REP nodes and as much as 1000 standard LoRa W Annodes. The results show that the proposed LoRa-REP with slotted delay can scale, maintain compatibility with standard LoRa Wanbackend and, at the same time, optimize average performance (up to 10%). Moreover, the simulations can be used to obtain the set of parameters of LoRa-REP with slotted delay that match goals of each application.