LBT-Based Resource Allocation Methods Utilizing Periodicity of Traffic in LPWAN

Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) have recently attracted much attention from both industry and academia. In some LPWAN applications, periodic uplink (UL) traffic dominates the network traffic. Since LPWANs adopt simple asynchronous random access protocols, continuous packet collisions may occur in the periodic UL traffic. Therefore, this paper proposes an autonomous distributed resource allocation method that utilizes carrier sense (CS) and UL traffic periodicity. A node detects the downlink (DL) signal to another node via CS and selects wireless resources to avoid packet collisions. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the packet delivery rate (PDR) performance by up to about 26% and 9% compared to ALOHA and listen-before-talk (LBT) based method, respectively.