TS-LoRa: Time-slotted LoRaWAN for the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Automation and data capture in manufacturing, known as Industry 4.0, requires the deployment of a large number of wireless sensor devices in industrial environments. These devices have to be connected via a reliable, low-latency, low-power and low operating-cost network. Although LoRaWAN provides a low-power and reasonable-cost network technology, its current ALOHA-based MAC protocol limits its scalability and reliability. A common practise in wireless networks is to solve this issue and improve scalability through the use of time-slotted communications. However, any time-slotted approach comes with overheads to compute and disseminate the transmission schedule in addition to ensuring global time synchronisation. Affording these overheads is not straight forward with LoRaWAN restrictions on radio duty-cycle and downlink availability. Therefore, in this work, we propose TS-LoRa, an approach that tackles these overheads by allowing devices to self-organise and determine their slot positions in a frame autonomously. In addition to that, only one dedicated slot in each frame is used to ensure global synchronisation and handle acknowledgements. Our experimental results with 25 nodes show that TS-LoRa can achieve more than 99% packet delivery ratio even for the most distant nodes. Moreover, our simulations with a higher number of nodes revealed that TS-LoRa exhibits a lower energy consumption than the confirmable version of LoRaWAN while not compromising the packet delivery ratio.