Experimental Evaluation of LoRaWAN in NS-3

TL;DR

This paper provides an extensive simulation-based evaluation of LoRaWAN performance metrics like PDR and throughput across various network configurations, offering insights for optimizing large-scale IoT deployments.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive NS-3 simulation study of LoRaWAN, analyzing performance under different network sizes and mobility scenarios, which is novel in its detailed evaluation approach.

Findings

Packet delivery ratio varies with network size and traffic.

Uplink throughput is affected by device mobility and traffic intensity.

Sub-band utilization insights inform network optimization strategies.

Abstract

Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) is an open medium access control (MAC) layer technology devised for the long range connectivity of massive number of low power network devices. This work gives an overview of the key aspects of LoRaWAN technology and presents results that we achieved via extensive evaluation of Class A LoRaWAN devices in different network settings using the state-of-the-art network simulator (NS-3). At first, we focus on a single device and its mobility. We further undertook evaluations in an extended network scenario with a changing number of devices and traffic intensity. In particular, we evaluate the packet delivery ratio (PDR), uplink (UL) throughput, and sub-band utilization for the confirmed and unconfirmed UL transmissions in different environments. Our results give new insights for future efforts to optimize the LoRaWAN performance for different large scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications with low power end devices.