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

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

1. CONCLUSION

Starting with discussion on basic working of LPWAN standards and pros and cons of each standard, we described LoRaWAN in more details as we used the LPWAN standard for our experiments. We then surveyed existing experimental studies on the effect of mobility for LPWAN, which helped us set our thesis objectives. We then presented the implementation details and explained our experimental setup. While doing so we provided insights into the working of communication code which acts as a guideline for future research. The last step was to conduct experiments by subjecting the end node to human as well as auto mobility. We recorded the packet loss rate and end to end delay for the network by varying the mobility speed, distance between the end node and gateway, and by varying the data packet size.
The experimental results allowed us to identify the issues faced by LPWAN network when subjected to mobility conditions. In case of the indoor environment, the average end to end delay increased as we increased the packet size and the distance from the gateway. The average end to end delay for mobile node increased as the distance between the end node and gateway increased. The packet loss rate was low when the node is stationary. However, it dramatically increased as the distance and speed of the end node increased. We observed that LPWAN shows promising results when the end device is stationary. However, our results further showed that LPWAN is easily impacted even with minor mobility like human mobility. The impact of mobility was significantly escalated as the distance between the gateway and end device was increased. The impact of mobility increased as the end node speed was increased. Our results also revealed that impact of mobility was greater for an indoor environment than an outdoor environment.
We expect that the results and guidelines discussed in this research will be useful for students, engineers and researchers who are currently working on or interested deploying a LPWAN network in mobile environment or for those who are working to developing mobility aware LPWAN standards.

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