Developing Energy Autonomous and Cable-less Multi-gateway LoRa Networks

Long Range (LoRa) networks are a reliable and efficient solution to serve Internet of Things (IoT) applications in a long range rural and forest areas. The capability of the gateways, both for wireless connection with the backbone network and be powered by renewable energy resources, makes possible the development of energy autonomous and without the need of cabling LoRa networks. This perspective greatly facilitates the network installation in hard-to-reach areas, as well as reducing their operating costs. An important obstacle, for the operation of energy autonomous LoRa networks, is the need for continuous operation of the gateways defined by the LoRaWAN protocol, leading to increased power consumption. For this reason, it is necessary the creation of a protocol that will reduce the energy consumption of the gateways, while maintaining the quality of the services provided in the IoT applications. In this paper we present a new hybrid protocol for energy autonomous and cable-less multi-gateway LoRa networks. The simulation results showed that the proposed protocol ensures a more than 50% reduced energy consumption for the gateways, as well as increased efficiency and reliability compared to the existing protocol, at the cost of slightly increased delay in data transmission.