Probabilistic and distributed traffic control in LPWANs

Low-power, low data transmission rates, and long-range wireless networks, also known as LPWANs, are intended to work best with equipment that uses few resources and can be used for many years thanks to their long battery life operation. This type of networks can handle traffic from nearly 1,000 nodes while maintaining a duty cycle of less than 1%. However, as the nodes become denser, the number of collisions increases and network traffic management becomes mandatory. To address this concern, we propose a Distributed and Probabilistic Traffic Control algorithm (DiPTC) that allows nodes to change their traffic in response to the application requirements (e.g., acquiring K measurements over a period of time) while being agnostic to the number of nodes or the network topology. When this requirement is not achieved, the gateway sends a feedback message to all the nodes so that they may adapt their traffic. We compare the proposed solution to LoRaWAN and to a Centralized Optimal Traffic Control solution (COTraC), in simulation. Compared to LoRaWAN, our algorithm proved successful in achieving the objective while minimizing collisions and extending the network lifetime threefold.