LoRaIN: A Constructive Interference-Assisted Reliable and Energy-Efficient LoRa Indoor Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces LoRaIN, a novel link-layer protocol that leverages constructive interference and booster nodes to significantly improve reliability and energy efficiency of indoor LoRa networks.

Contribution

LoRaIN is the first protocol to enhance indoor LoRa network reliability and energy efficiency using constructive interference and booster nodes without special hardware.

Findings

Reliability increased from 62% to 95% with 15% booster nodes.

End-devices became approximately 2.5 times more energy-efficient.

Constructive interference effectively boosts indoor LoRa performance.

Abstract

LoRa is a promising communication technology for enabling the next-generation indoor Internet of Things applications. Very few studies, however, have analyzed its performance indoors. Besides, these indoor studies investigate mostly the RSSI and SNR of the received packets at the gateway, which, as we show, may not unfold the poor performance of LoRa and its MAC protocol, LoRaWAN, indoors in terms of reliability and energy-efficiency. In this paper, we extensively evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN indoors and then use the key insights to boost its reliability and energy-efficiency by proposing LoRaIN, LoRa Indoor Network, a new link-layer protocol that can be effectively used for indoor deployments. The approach to boosting the reliability and energy efficiency in LoRaIN is underpinned by enabling constructive interference with specific timing requirements analyzed both empirically and mathematically for different pairs of channel bandwidth and spreading factor and relaying precious acknowledgments to the end-devices with the assistance of several booster nodes. The booster nodes do not need any special capability and can be a subset of the LoRa end-devices. To our knowledge, LoRaIN is the first protocol for boosting reliability and energy-efficiency in indoor LoRa networks. We evaluate its performance in an indoor testbed consisting of one LoRaWAN gateway and 20 end-devices. Our extensive evaluation shows that when 15% of the end-devices operate as booster nodes, the reliability at the gateway increases from 62% to 95%, and the end-devices are approximately 2.5x energy-efficient.