RTPL: A Real-Time Communication Protocol for LoRa Network

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is prominently emerging in applications of large-scale and wide-area applications, such as oilfield management, smart grid management, real-time equipment monitoring, and integration of traffic management systems for smart cities. Relying on short-range wireless technologies (e.g., WirelessHART and ISA100.11a), traditional wireless solutions for industrial automation find it challenging to support the expansive scale of today’s IIoT. To address this limitation, we propose to adopt LoRaWAN, a prominent low-power wide-area network technology, for industrial automation. LoRaWAN for industrial automation poses some unique challenges. The fundamental building blocks of any industrial automation system are feedback control loops that largely rely on real-time communication. LoRaWAN traditionally adopts a simple protocol based on ALOHA with no collision avoidance or Listen Before Talk with Clear Channel Assessment and Random Backoff mechanisms to minimize energy consumption, which are less suitable for real-time communication. Existing real-time protocols for short-range technologies cannot be applied to a LoRaWAN network due to its unique characteristics such as asymmetry between downlink and the uplink spectrum, predefined modes (or classes) of operation, and concurrent reception through orthogonal spreading factors. In this paper, we address these challenges and propose RTPL- a Real-Time communication Protocol for LoRaWAN networks. RTPL is a low-overhead and conflict-free communication protocol allowing autonomous real-time communication of low-energy devices and exploits LoRa’s capability of parallel communication. We implement our approach on LoRa devices and evaluate through both physical experiments and extensive simulations. All results show that RTPL achieves on average 75% improvement in real-time performance without sacrificing throughput or energy compared to traditional LoRaWAN.