A Spreading Factor Congestion Status-Aware Adaptive Data Rate Algorithm

LoRaWAN has established itself as one of the leading MAC layer protocols in the field of LPWAN. Although the technology itself is quite mature, its resource allocation mechanism, the Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) algorithm is still quite new, unspecified and its functionalities still limited. Various studies have shown that the performance of the ADR algorithm gradually suffers in dense networks. Recent studies and proposals have been made as attempts to improve the algorithm. In this paper, the authors proposed a spreading factor congestion status aware ADR version and compared its performance against that of four other related algorithms to study the performance improvements the algorithm brings to LoRaWAN in terms of DER and EC. LoRaSim was used to evaluate the algorithms’ performances in a simple sensing application that involved end devices transmitting data to the gateway every hour. The performances were measured based on how they affected DER as the network size increases. The results obtained show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the currently existing implementations of the ADR in terms of both DER and EC. However, the proposed algorithm is slightly outperformed by the native ADR in terms of EC. This was expected as the algorithm was mainly built to improve DER. The proposed algorithm builds on the existing algorithms and the ADR and significantly improves them in terms of DER and EC (excluding the native ADR), which is a significant step towards an ideal implementation of LoRaWAN’s ADR.