WIP: Exploring DSME MAC for LoRa – A System Integration and First Evaluation

Abstract

LoRa is a popular wireless technology that enables low-throughput (bytes) long-range communication (km) at low energy consumption (mW). Its transmission, though, is on one side prone to interference during long on-air times, and on the other side subject to duty cycle restrictions. LoRaWAN defines a MAC and a vertical stack on top of LoRa. LoRaWAN circumvents the above limitations by imposing a centralized network architecture, which heavily reduces downlink capacity and prevents peer-to-peer communication. This makes it unusable for many deployments. The Deterministic and Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) of IEEE 802.15.4e benefits of time-slotted communication and peer-to-peer communication and has the potential to overcome LoRaWAN limitations. In this work, we implement DSME on top of LoRa in the open source IoT OS RIOT and open the field for first evaluation experiments on real hardware. Initial results indicate that DSME-LoRa not only enables reliable peer-to-peer communication for constrained IoT devices, but also scales with an increasing number of nodes.