Investigating and experimenting CSMA channel access mechanisms for LoRa IoT networks

Abstract

Given the incredible worldwide uptake of Long-Range (LoRa) networks for a large variety of innovative Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and the high flexibility in deploying private ad-hoc LoRa networks, it is important to consider dense environments and to improve the robustness of LoRa transmissions with more advanced channel access mechanisms. In this article, we investigate how a Carrier Sense mechanism can be adapted to decrease collisions in LoRa transmissions for both short and long messages. We explain the various steps towards the proposition of a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) protocol adapted to LoRa networks. We show experimental results using our low-cost IoT LoRa framework to implement innovative longrange image sensor nodes.