Low Power Wide Area Networks (lpwan): Technology Review And Experimental Study on Mobility Effect

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

The objectives of this research are three folds.

• 
  Perform a thorough review on the emerging LPWAN technology concentrating on the effect of mobility.
  
• 
  Perform real world experiments to analyze the mobility effect on the LPWAN tehcnology.
  
• 
  Provide guidelines for deploying LPWAN in mobile environments.
  

4. PROPOSED APPROACH

In this thesis, we perform a comprehensive real-world experimental study to evaluate, analyze and characterize the performance of LPWAN in both indoor and outdoor environments with varying degrees of mobility. Consequently, we report three major findings on the performance of LPWAN (in terms of end-to-end delay and packet loss
rates):

• 
  The performance of LPWAN is impacted even by a small degree of mobility (i.e. human mobility)
  
• 
  The effect of mobility is greater in an indoor environment.
  
• 
  The longer distance to the gateway further escalates the impact of mobility.
  

These results suggest that new mobility aware LPWAN protocols need to be developed.
The contributions of this research are summarized as follows.

• 
  We present a through review on LPWAN focusing on mobility effect.
  
• 
  We provide the first real-world experimental results that characterize the performance of LPWAN for mobile IoT applications.
  
• 
  We consider the effect of mobility in both indoor and outdoor mobile environments.
  
• 
  We provide a multidimensional analysis on the performance of LPWAN by varying degrees of mobility along with adjustment of network parameters such as the packet size and the distance to the gateway.
  

5. ORGANIZATION OF THE WORK

This thesis is organized into eight chapters. After presenting Introduction in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, we provide an overview of IoT and LPWAN technologies. We also discuss different LPWAN standards and present pros and cons for each LPWAN standard.
Chapter 3 discusses the mobility aspect of LPWAN, the current trends, and research related to effect of mobility on LPWAN. In Chapter 4, we discuss the system implementation of the LPWAN network used for our experiments and provide development guidelines for the same. Chapter 5 presents the experimental setup for our experiments followed by an in-depth review of our experimental results in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 discusses the lessons learned and how can these help in designing LPWAN applications. Chapter 8 describes the conclusions of this thesis and future work.

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