Energy Consumption in LoRa IoT: Benefit...

We propose a scheme to reduce and balance the

energy consumption of nodes in dense IoT use cases implemented

with LoRa. We study a multiple gateways network with nodes

uniformly distributed around each gateway, and restricted to

use only short spreading factors. Relays using longer spreading

factors, are added to the network infrastructure to forward the

nodes transmissions that cannot reach a gateway directly. We

find that the impact of the interference added by the relays on

the probability of successful transmissions becomes marginal for

high density networks. Furthermore, in such dense networks the

consumption at the nodes is lowered one order of magnitude

with marginal increase in the overall energy consumption of the

network. Also, the consumption spread between nodes close and

far from the gateway is effectively reduced.