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Although the idea of using wireless links for covering large areas is not new, the advent of LPWANs has recently started changing the game. Simple, robust, narrowband modulation schemes permit the implementation of low-cost radio devices offering high receiver sensitivity, thus improving the overall link budget. The several technologies belonging to the LPWAN family, including the well-known LoRaWAN solution, provide a cost-effective answer to many Internet-of-things (IoT) applications, requiring wireless communication capable of supporting large networks of many devices (e.g., smart metering). Generally, the adopted MAC strategy is based on pure ALOHA, which, among other things, allows to minimize the traffic overhead under constrained duty cycle limitations of the unlicensed bands. Unfortunately, ALOHA suffers from poor scalability, rapidly collapsing in dense networks. This work investigates the design of an improved LoRaWAN MAC scheme based on slotted ALOHA. In particular, the required time dissemination is provided by out-of-band communications leveraging on FM-RDS broadcasting. An experimental setup based on low-cost hardware is used to characterize the obtainable synchronization performance and derive a timing error model. Consequently, improvements in success probability and energy efficiency have been validated by means of simulations in very large networks with up to 10000 nodes. It is shown that the advantage of the proposed scheme over conventional LoRaWAN communication is up to 100% when short update time and large payload are required. Similar results are obtained regarding the energy efficiency improvement, which is close to 100% for relatively short transmission intervals and long message duration; however, due to the additional overhead for listening to the time dissemination messages, efficiency gain can be negative for short-duration messages fastly repeating., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement

Many new narrowband low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) (e.g., LoRaWAN, Sigfox) have opted to use pure ALOHA-like access for its reduced control overhead and asynchronous transmissions. Although asynchronous access reduces the energy consumption of IoT devices, the network performance suffers from high intra-network interference in dense deployments. Contrarily, synchronous access can improve throughput and fairness, but it requires time synchronization. Unfortunately, maintaining synchronization over the narrowband LPWANs wastes channel time and transmission opportunities. In this paper, we propose the use of out-of-band time-dissemination to relatively synchronize LoRa devices and thereby facilitate resource-efficient slotted uplink communication. To this end, we conceptualize and analyze a co-designed synchronization and random access mechanism that can effectively exploit technologies providing limited time accuracy, such as FM radio data system (FM-RDS). While considering the LoRa-specific parameters, we derive the throughput of the proposed mechanism, compare it to a generic synchronous random access using in-band synchronization, and design the communication parameters under time uncertainty. We scrutinize the transmission time uncertainty of a device by introducing a clock error model that accounts for the errors in the synchronization source, local clock, propagation delay, and transceiver's transmission time uncertainty. We characterize the time uncertainty of FM-RDS with hardware measurements and perform simulations to evaluate the proposed solution. The results, presented in terms of success probability, throughput, and fairness for a single-cell scenario, suggest that FM-RDS, despite its poor absolute synchronization, can be used effectively to realize slotted LoRa communication with performance similar to that of more accurate time-dissemination technologies., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, final version to appear in IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies are gaining momentum for internet-of-things (IoT) applications since they promise wide coverage to a massive number of battery-operated devices using grant-free medium access. LoRaWAN, with its physical (PHY) layer design and regulatory efforts, has emerged as the widely adopted LPWAN solution. By using chirp spread spectrum modulation with qausi-orthogonal spreading factors (SFs), LoRa PHY offers coverage to wide-area applications while supporting high-density of devices. However, thus far its scalability performance has been inadequately modeled and the effect of interference resulting from the imperfect orthogonality of the SFs has not been considered. In this paper, we present an analytical model of a single-cell LoRa system that accounts for the impact of interference among transmissions over the same SF (co-SF) as well as different SFs (inter-SF). By modeling the interference field as Poisson point process under duty-cycled ALOHA, we derive the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) distributions for several interference conditions. Results show that, for a duty cycle as low as 0.33%, the network performance under co-SF interference alone is considerably optimistic as the inclusion of inter-SF interference unveils a further drop in the success probability and the coverage probability of approximately 10% and 15%, respectively for 1500 devices in a LoRa channel. Finally, we illustrate how our analysis can characterize the critical device density with respect to cell size for a given reliability target.

Noise power estimation is a key issue in modern wireless communication systems. It allows resource allocation by detecting white spectral spaces effectively, and gives control over the communication process by adjusting transmission power. Thus far, the proposed estimation methods in the literature are based on spectral averaging, eigenvalues of sample covariance matrix, information theory, and statistical signal analysis. Each method is characterized by certain stability, accuracy and complexity. However, the existing literature does not provide an appropriate comparison. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the existing estimation techniques intensively in terms of stability and accuracy, followed by detailed complexity analysis. The basis for comparison is signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation in simulated industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band transmission. The source of used background distortions is complex noise measurement, recorded by USRP-2932 in an industrial production area. Based on the examined solutions, we also analyze the influence of noise samples separation techniques on the estimation process. As a response to the defects in the used methods, we propose a novel noise samples separation algorithm based on the adaptation of rank order filtering (ROF). In addition to simple implementation, the proposed method has a very good 0.5 dB root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and smaller than 0.1 dB resolution, thus achieving a performance that is comparable with the methods exploiting information theory concepts.