ADR-Lite: A Low-Complexity Adaptive Data Rate Scheme for the LoRa Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces ADR-Lite, a low-complexity adaptive data rate scheme for LoRa networks that improves packet delivery, especially in mobile and noisy environments, by configuring transmission parameters without relying on historical data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel link-based ADR approach that reduces complexity by ignoring packet history, enhancing performance in dynamic IoT scenarios.

Findings

ADR-Lite achieves 2.8 times higher PDR in mobile, noisy conditions.

The approach outperforms original ADR and other algorithms in simulation.

Low space complexity makes it suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices.

Abstract

The long-range and low energy consumption requirements in Internet of Things (IoT) applications have led to a new wireless communication technology known as Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWANs). In recent years, the Long Range (LoRa) protocol has gained a lot of attention as one of the most promising technologies in LPWAN. Choosing the right combination of transmission parameters is a major challenge in the LoRa networks. In LoRa, an Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) mechanism is executed to configure each End Device's (ED) transmission parameters, resulting in improved performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a link-based ADR approach that aims to configure the transmission parameters of EDs by making a decision without taking into account the history of the last received packets, resulting in a relatively low space complexity approach. In this study, we present four different scenarios for assessing performance, including a scenario where mobile EDs are considered. Our simulation results show that in a mobile scenario with high channel noise, our proposed algorithm's Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) is 2.8 times outperforming the original ADR and 1.35 times that of other relevant algorithms.