HARE: Supporting efficient uplink multi-hop communications in self-organizing LPWANs

TL;DR

HARE introduces a flexible LPWAN protocol enabling uplink multi-hop communications, which enhances energy efficiency and self-organization in IoT networks without compromising reliability.

Contribution

The paper presents the HARE protocol stack that supports uplink multi-hop in LPWANs, demonstrating energy savings and improved self-organization capabilities.

Findings

Up to 15% energy savings with multi-hop approach

Maintains network reliability in multi-hop configurations

Validated resilience through iterative testing and device switching

Abstract

The emergence of low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) as a new agent in the Internet of Things (IoT) will result in the incorporation into the digital world of low-automated processes from a wide variety of sectors. The single-hop conception of typical LPWAN deployments, though simple and robust, overlooks the self-organization capabilities of network devices, suffers from lack of scalability in crowded scenarios, and pays little attention to energy consumption. Aimed to take the most out of devices' capabilities, the HARE protocol stack is proposed in this paper as a new LPWAN technology flexible enough to adopt uplink multi-hop communications when proving energetically more efficient. In this way, results from a real testbed show energy savings of up to 15% when using a multi-hop approach while keeping the same network reliability. System's self-organizing capability and resilience have been also validated after performing numerous iterations of the association mechanism and deliberately switching off network devices.