TRILO: A Traffic Indication-Based Downlink Communication Protocol for LoRaWAN

Abstract EN

LPWAN (Low-Power Wide Area Network) technologies such as LoRa and SigFox are emerging as a technology of choice for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications where tens of thousands of untethered devices are deployed over a wide area.

In such operating environments, energy conservation is one of the most crucial concerns and network protocols adopt various power saving schemes to lengthen device lifetimes.

For example, to avoid idle listening, LoRaWAN restricts downlink communications.

However, the confined design philosophy impedes the deployment of IoT applications that require asynchronous downlink communications.

In this paper, we design and implement an energy efficient downlink communication mechanism, named TRILO, for LoRaWAN.

We aim to make TRILO be energy efficient while obeying an unavoidable trade-off that balances between latency and energy consumption.

TRILO adopts a beacon mechanism that periodically alerts end-devices which have pending downlink frames.

We implement the proposed protocol on top of commercially available LoRaWAN components and confirm that the protocol operates properly in real-world experiments.

Experimental results show that TRILO successfully transmits downlink frames without losses while uplink traffic suffers from a slight increase in latency because uplink transmissions should halt during beacons and downlink transmissions.

Computer simulation results also show that the proposed scheme is more energy efficient than the legacy LoRaWAN downlink protocol.