Experimenting Long Range Wide Area Network in an e-Health Environment: Discussion and Future Directions

Abstract

Wearable devices/sensors and wireless networking play a pivotal role in enabling e-Health environments demanding biometry monitoring outside hospital facilities. In this regard, the Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology is considered the most adopted wide area network since it promises ubiquitous connectivity in outdoor e-Health applications while keeping network structures and simple management, recently gained interest from the research and industrial community. However, the coexistence of high-dense wireless sensors brings several issues to LoRaWAN, such as high interference and channel congestion. In this paper, we introduce assessments on the LoRaWAN in an e-Health scenario by modeling wireless sensor traffic and implementing it on a network simulator. Simulation results suggest that while LoRaWAN can be extremely useful, by providing communication to thousands of simultaneous users, but its MAC layer structure and design limits significantly. We also introduce future research directions driven by the simulation results and LoRaWAN characteristics, for the goal to improve LoRaWAN performance in an e-Health scenario.