Cooperative Downlink Listening for Low-Power Long-Range Wide-Area Network

Recently, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications has become more active with the emergence of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), which has the advantages of low-power and long communication distance. Among the various LPWAN technologies, long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN, or LoRa) is considered as the most mature technology. However, since LoRa performs uplink-oriented communication to increase energy efficiency, there is a restriction on the downlink function from the network server to the end devices. In this paper, we propose cooperative downlink listening to solve the fundamental problem of LoRa. In particular, the proposed scheme can be extended to various communication models such as groupcasting and geocasting by combining with the data-centric model. Experiments also show that the proposed technology not only significantly reduces network traffic compared to the LoRa standard, but also guarantees maximum energy efficiency of the LoRa.