Dissertation digest: Designing Scalable yet Energy-Efficient Low-Power Wide-Area Networks

Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) provide connectivity to widely-spread battery-powered devices. In such networks, very large numbers of terminals compete for radio access. Frame collisions naturally occur in the absence of coordination, which is detrimental to network performance. However, each terminal transmits relatively small and sporadic amounts of data. The design of strategies to operate large-scale LPWAN is challenging. In fact, any introduction of protocol overhead for terminal coordination purposes has a detrimental impact on device energy efficiency and ultimately battery life. Herein, this paper summarizes a doctoral thesis [1] focused on the design of scalable yet energy efficient access schemes for LPWAN. One of the key takeaways of this work is the need for dynamic access protocols, capable of adapting their behavior to the traffic load while minimizing the amount of control plane messages. In order to take a step back from the work accomplished, methodological insights about the approaches and performance evaluation tools used during the thesis are also provided. Finally, research perspectives are discussed. More specifically, the application of such schemes to Direct-to-Satellite IoT networks is foreseen as a means to enable worldwide and efficient low-power networks.