Optimal Gateway Placement Based on Fuzzy C-Means for Low Power Wide Area Networks

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies recently gained interest from the research and industrial community. Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate directly with gateways, which act as bridges towards a central network server and the Internet. In this context, it is important to study how to place multiple gateways in an area considering Quality of Service, Capital expenditure (CAPEX), and operational expenditure (OPEX) requirements. This is because network planning and optimization are considered to be significant issues that impact on the application performance, CAPEX, and OPEX. In this paper, we propose an optimal LoRa gateway placement (PLACE). It considers the Gap statistics method to find the number of LoRa gateway, which is used to compute the gateway placement using the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm. Simulation results show that PLACE reduced in 36% the CAPEX and OPEX compared to the grid and random gateway placement, while keeps a similar Packet Delivery Ratio.