Simulative Assessment of the Listen before Talk Adaptive Frequency Agility Medium Access Control Protocol for LoRaWAN Networks in IoT Scenarios

Abstract

The work presents an extensive simulative assessment of a LoRaWAN network that adopts the Listen Before Talk (LBT) Adaptive Frequency Agility (AFA) channel access technique in compliance with the ETSI regulations. The paper presents the results obtained in several scenarios with a different number of nodes and different configurations of the LoRaWAN Medium Access Control (MAC) parameters. The aim of the paper is to give insights about the performance achievable by changing the configuration parameters. For example, in all the scenarios considered in this work, once the number of nodes is fixed, the impact on the message loss ratio of the considered MAC parameters is always lower than 7%. Conversely, the impact of such parameters on the end-to-end delay is much more significant. The methodology of this assessment is of general validity and can be exploited by the network designer during the network configuration phase to obtain the most suitable combination of the MAC parameters for the network under consideration, based on the number of nodes and the application requirements.