Gateway Energy Aware Protocol for LoRaWAN

Abstract

The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) standard was primarily proposed to connect a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices over wide geographical areas while maintaining low energy consumption. In these networks, end devices and the network server exchange uplink and downlink messages through gateways. The selection of the gateway for downlink transmissions is often based solely on the received signal strength. However, this approach can lead to unbalanced energy consumption among gateways, thereby reducing the overall network lifetime—particularly in contexts such as precision agriculture or environmental monitoring in remote areas, where gateways cannot be powered by the electrical grid and their batteries are difficult to replace. To address this issue, we propose a communication protocol designed to extend the lifetime of LoRaWAN networks by considering the energy constraints of the gateways. This protocol integrates the residual energy of the gateways into the downlink selection process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach increases the network lifetime by approximately seven times compared to the standard protocol, while maintaining network performance at an acceptable level of the abstract.