Low-power LoRaWAN Extender Using Multiple Relays: Design and Evaluation

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) has been largely developed and applied for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications with wide coverage and low-power consumption. However, for environment with many obstacles and blind spots, the classical star network has limitation in area coverage. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the LoRaWAN extender using multiple relays in terms of coverage ability, performance, and power consumption. In this research, the design and implementation of a multiple relay system compatible with the LoRaWAN protocol is studied to extend the coverage of a classical LoRaWAN gateway. The relay can have multiple years of operation with a compact battery. These relays were deployed along a deep river will complex terrain that the gateway can not fully cover. The longest distance of each relay was recorded so that the packets sent by the previous relay were still received by the next relay, the packet loss ratio and latency were calculated to evaluate the performance, and power consumption was measured by using a power analyzer. The results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed design for multiple relays to extend the LoRaWAN network.