Battery Optimal Configuration of Transmission Settings in LoRa Moving Nodes

This paper proposes a novel method of selecting battery-optimal transmission settings for moving nodes in Long Range (LoRa) system. In LoRa communication, transmission setting plays an important role as it affects coverage range, data rate, and battery consumption. Therefore, its optimal configuration is required to ensure successful communication with long battery life. However, with small data rate and resource-limited LoRa nodes, configuration of optimal settings becomes challenging. Current solutions require multiple transmissions for fixed distance between nodes and gateways to achieve the optimal settings. The existing methods become unsuitable for moving nodes because of continuous change in distance between the nodes and the gateways. Thus, each transmission would require different optimal setting. Due to lack of such configuration method, conventional method uses same fixed high energy setting for all transmissions to ensure high reliability, which results in shorter battery life. To minimize energy consumption without affecting reliability, the proposed method dynamically configures the optimal setting for each transmission depending on the distance between current location of the moving node and the nearest gateway, using path loss estimation. The simulation result shows that, for 95% reliability, the proposed method achieves 47% reduction in energy consumption as compared with conventional method.