A Novel Approach to Improve the Adaptive-Data-Rate Scheme for IoT LoRaWAN

The long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) uses the adaptive-data-rate (ADR) algorithm to control the data rate and transmission power. The LoRaWAN ADR algorithm adjusts the spreading factor (SF) to allocate the appropriate transmission rate and transmission power to reduce power consumption.The updating SF and transmission power of the standard ADR algorithm are based on the channel state, but it does not guarantee efficient energy consumption among all the nodes in complex environments with high-varying channel conditions. Therefore, this article proposes a new enhancement approach to the ADR+ algorithm at the network server, which only depends on the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The enhancement ADR algorithm ADR++ introduces an energy-efficiency controller α related to the total energy consumption of all nodes, to use it for adjusting the average SNR of the last records. We implement our new enhanced ADR at the network server (NS) using the FLoRa module in OMNET++. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed ADR++ algorithm leads to a significant improvement in terms of the network delivery ratio and energy efficiency that reduces the network energy consumption up to 17.5% and improves the packet success rate up to 31.55% over the existing ADR+ algorithm.