Analysis of a Novel Media Access Control Protocol for LoRa

Long-range wide-area networks (LoRaWANs) are emerging technologies for the Internet of Things. They provide ultralong-range communication and low power consumption but have poor scalability due to the ALOHA media access method. In this article, we first present a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol which is time-slot-based and channel contention constrained to enhance the network performance in terms of throughput and energy consumption. We propose an analytical model which is based on three assumptions and Markov chains to analyze the performance. Various protocol and network scale settings are considered during the analysis of the performance of the network. We performed simulations in MATLAB to verify the validity of the assumptions and the accuracy of the model. We show that our new protocol enhances the throughput by approximately two times as compared to ALOHA in LoRaWAN networks, while the average energy consumption per packet is significantly reduced if the optimum protocol settings are used.