Collision and Energy Efficiency Assessment of LoRaWANs with Cluster-based Gateway Placement

LoRaWAN is one of the most prominent low power wide area network technologies. It offers long transmission distances with little energy consumption. The drawback is potential message collision. For that reason, recent literature discusses different alternatives to the currently used random channel access suffering from many message collisions and evaluates improvement possibilities. This is of major interest for network operators to future-proof LoRaWAN quality. One approach to reduce collision probability is cell size management via intelligent gateway placement. For that reason, this work presents an exhaustive study for k-means based clustering to distribute gateways. Different network quality metrics, namely full coverage for all sensors, collision probability, and energy efficiency, are evaluated. Thus, the contribution is a simple and scalable gateway placement approach for LoRaWAN. The performance evaluation shows a trade-off between placed gateways and energy efficiency. Furthermore, with reasonable runtime for large-scale networks, the clustering based approach is a viable solution for future network pre-planning or even final placement.