Fair Adaptive Data Rate Allocation and Power Control in LoRaWAN

In this paper, we present results of a study of the data rate fairness among nodes within a LoRaWAN cell. Since LoRa/LoRaWAN supports various data rates, we firstly derive the fairest ratios of deploying each data rate within a cell for a fair collision probability. LoRa/LoRaWAN, like other frequency modulation based radio interfaces, exhibits the capture effect in which only the stronger signal of colliding signals will be extracted. This leads to unfairness, where far nodes or nodes experiencing higher attenuation are less likely to see their packets received correctly. Therefore, we secondly develop a transmission power control algorithm to balance the received signal powers from all nodes regardless of their distances from the gateway for a fair data extraction. Simulations show that our approach achieves higher fairness in data rate than the state-of-art in almost all network configurations.