Trading hardware with medium reservation to tackle scalability in low‐cost, single‐channel LoRa networks

LoRa is actually one of the most popular LPWAN technologies for IoT applications, due to its low‐power and long‐range transmissions. A single low‐cost, single‐channel LoRa Gateway is able to cover a large number of End‐Devices spread over a wide area. Gateway diversity is traditionally used to reduce the impact of packet losses: adding more Gateways can increase both delivery ratio and goodput, even when using a pure‐ALOHA access policy. However, such solution can be cost‐expensive and the adoption of control‐based medium access strategies, without violating the duty‐cycle constraints, can be, in some situations, a better option. In this letter, we compare the effectiveness of Gateway diversity against a medium access protocol with channel reservation. We evaluate if and in which scenarios, relatively to delivery ratio and goodput, in a single communication channel, it is better to add more Gateways to the system (hardware) or adopt a reservation protocol (software) for tackling the scaling‐up of the number of End‐Devices.