Adaptive mitigation of the Air-Time pressure in LoRa multi-gateway architectures

LoRa is a promising technology in the current Internet of Things market, which operates in un-licensed bands achieving long-range communications and with ultra power devices. In this work we capitalize on the idea introduced in [1], i.e. balance the Air-Time of the different modulation spreading factors (SF), and adapt it to operate in a typical metropolitan scenario comprising multiple gateways (GWs) interconnected to a same network server. Our proposed approach, named ADaptive Mitigation of the AIr-time pressure in lORa (AD MAIORA), relies on a suitable measure of the per-spreading-factor load at each GW - quantified by means of a so-called pressure table -, and on a relevant heuristic algorithm which attempts to balance such a per-SF-pressure. Especially in cases of very loaded scenarios, where a high number of nodes insist on the same GWs, the use of AD MAIORA shows significant performance gains, up to a factor of 5 improvements with respect to the legacy LoRaWAN's Adaptive Data Rate.