A Duty Cycle-Based Gateway Selection Algorithm for LoRaWAN Downlink Communication.

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) has been developed to meet the requirements for the enormous device-to-device communication of Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which consist of a large number of participating devices spread over large coverage areas with low data rates and low power consumption. It supports communications in both directions, uplink, and downlink directions. However, the downlink communication in the current LoRaWAN raises the bottleneck issue at gateways due to the used gateway selection algorithm. This paper proposes a novel gateway selection algorithm based on the duty cycle time-off values for the existing gateways, Duty Cycle Gateway Selection (DCGS), to direct acknowledgment packets as downlink traffic towards the most suitable gateway. Thus, the proposed system avoids subsequent retransmission of previously sent traffic that leads to excessive traffic overloading the network. The proposed system avoids exhausting a gateway duty cycle with downlink traffic by distributing the downlink traffic among available gateways based on the duty cycle time off. DCGS is evaluated using FloRa and INET frameworks in the well-known network simulator OMNeT++. The result shows the superior performance of the proposed approach over the existing Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) based selection mechanism. It clearly indicates that the DCGS maintains a better confirmed packet delivery rate while reducing number of retransmissions, collisions, and power consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]