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Recent Advances in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) and Long Range (LoRa) Network

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 3137

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Albacete Research Institute of Informatics, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 02071 Albacete, Spain
Interests: low-power wide area networks (LPWAN); synchronization and scheduling of transmissions in resource-constrained environments; ML-oriented resource allocation in IoT networks; industrial IoT

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Guest Editor
Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Bałtycka 5, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland
Interests: performance evaluation of networking protocols; autoconfiguration and optimization of wireless networks; LP WAN; LoRa; radio planning; BLE; indoor positioning
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) emerged in recent years to fill a gap in the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in terms of long-range and low-power communication at the expense of high transmission airtimes, which makes them a core component of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. With LoRaWAN having become a key player in the machine-type communication domain, other promising communication standards are starting to raise the attention of both industry and academia. While leveraging a wide application scope in the Industrial IoT domain (IIoT), ranging from agriculture to manufacturing or logistics, most LPWAN standards still lack the required robustness and reliability under constrained scenarios such as massive or battery-operated deployments. Recent advances in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) domains are expected to bring numerous benefits in terms of efficient network scheduling and resource allocation. However, the constrained nature of battery-operated devices with limited memory and computational resources still poses a significant challenge for real-world implementations.

This Special Issue focuses on cutting-edge advances in LPWAN and in particular, Long Range (LoRa) networks. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Cutting-edge applications of LPWAN in the IIoT domain, including manufacturing, logistics, supply chain management, health care, smart cities, or agricultural approaches.
  • LPWAN real-world deployments in the 5G/beyond 5G (B5G) Era focusing on mMTC (massive Machine-Type Communications).
  • Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) approaches to improve LPWAN performance, including Network Digital Twin (NDT) and service orchestration.
  • Testbed proposals including novel network topologies and satellite communications.
  • Open hardware/software MCU-oriented design and implementation for power-aware LPWAN/LoRa connectivity.
  • Novel synchronization approaches, network scalability and efficiency enchancements.
  • Performance evaluation tools and benchmarking.
  • Novel MAC-layer improvements to LPWAN standards including LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, or Mioty.

Dr. Celia Garrido-Hidalgo
Prof. Dr. Krzysztof Grochla
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • LPWAN
  • LoRa
  • LoRaWAN
  • IIoT
  • AIoT

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

31 pages, 12366 KB  
Article
Gateway-Free LoRa Mesh on ESP32: Design, Self-Healing Mechanisms, and Empirical Performance
by Danilo Arregui Almeida, Juan Chafla Altamirano, Milton Román Cañizares, Pablo Palacios Játiva, Javier Guaña-Moya and Iván Sánchez
Sensors 2025, 25(19), 6036; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25196036 - 1 Oct 2025
Abstract
LoRa is a long-range, low-power wireless communication technology widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, its conventional implementation through Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) presents operational constraints due to its centralized topology and reliance on gateways. To overcome these limitations, [...] Read more.
LoRa is a long-range, low-power wireless communication technology widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, its conventional implementation through Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) presents operational constraints due to its centralized topology and reliance on gateways. To overcome these limitations, this work designs and validates a gateway-free mesh communication system that operates directly on commercially available commodity microcontrollers, implementing lightweight self-healing mechanisms suitable for resource-constrained devices. The system, based on ESP32 microcontrollers and LoRa modulation, adopts a mesh topology with custom mechanisms including neighbor-based routing, hop-by-hop acknowledgments (ACKs), and controlled retransmissions. Reliability is achieved through hop-by-hop acknowledgments, listen-before-talk (LBT) channel access, and duplicate suppression using alternate link triggering (ALT). A modular prototype was developed and tested under three scenarios such as ideal conditions, intermediate node failure, and extended urban deployment. Results showed robust performance, achieving a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), the percentage of successfully delivered DATA packets over those sent, of up to 95% in controlled environments and 75% under urban conditions. In the failure scenario, an average Packet Recovery Ratio (PRR), the proportion of lost packets successfully recovered through retransmissions, of 88.33% was achieved, validating the system’s self-healing capabilities. Each scenario was executed in five independent runs, with values calculated for both traffic directions and averaged. These findings confirm that a compact and fault-tolerant LoRa mesh network, operating without gateways, can be effectively implemented on commodity ESP32-S3 + SX1262 hardware. Full article
18 pages, 5855 KB  
Article
Scalability Analysis of LoRa and Sigfox in Congested Environment and Calculation of Optimum Number of Nodes
by Mandeep Malik, Ashwin Kothari and Rashmi Pandhare
Sensors 2024, 24(20), 6673; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24206673 - 17 Oct 2024
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2479
Abstract
Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies as part of IoT are gaining a lot of attention as they provide affordable communication over large areas. LoRa and Sigfox as part of LPWAN have emerged as highly effective and promising non-3GPP unlicensed band IoT technologies [...] Read more.
Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies as part of IoT are gaining a lot of attention as they provide affordable communication over large areas. LoRa and Sigfox as part of LPWAN have emerged as highly effective and promising non-3GPP unlicensed band IoT technologies while challenging the supremacy of cellular technologies for machine-to-machine-(M2M)-based use cases. This paper presents the design goals of LoRa and Sigfox while throwing light on their suitability in congested environments. A practical traffic generator of both LoRa and Sigfox is introduced and further interpolated for understanding simultaneous operation of 100 to 10,000 such nodes in close vicinity while establishing deep understanding on effects of collision, re-transmissions, and link behaviour. Previous work in this field have overlooked simultaneous deployment, collision issues, effects of re-transmission, and propagation profile while arriving at a number of successful receptions. This work uses packet error rate (PER) and delivery ratio, which are correct metrics to calculate successful transmissions. The obtained results show that a maximum of 100 LoRa and 200 Sigfox nodes can be deployed in a fixed transmission use case over an area of up to 1 km. As part of the future scope, solutions have been suggested to increase the effectiveness of LoRa and Sigfox networks. Full article
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