A minimalistic distance-vector routing protocol for LoRa mesh networks

LoRa has gained traction in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain as a Low Power, Wide Area Network (LPWAN) radio technology, providing low-power and long-range communication in the sub-GHz band. Most often it is used as part of the LoRaWAN architecture with a star-of-stars topology, but it can also be operated standalone, with a more flexible mesh network topology. In this paper, we propose a minimalistic Distance-vector (DV) Routing Protocol (RP) for LoRa mesh networks. It takes advantage of LoRa’s multiple Spreading Factors (SFs), their trade-off between transmission distance and bit rate, and their orthogonality property. This way, it can use well-known metrics like Hop Count (HC), Expected Transmission Count (ETX), etc., and also more complex ones, like multiSF-aware Time on Air (ToA). In the future, we aim at evaluating it both with the FLoRa framework and the OMNeT++ simulator, and with embedded boards featuring a LoRa radio transceiver.