RT-LoRa: A Medium Access Strategy to Support Real-Time Flows Over LoRa-Based Networks for Industrial IoT Applications

Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) are suitable for many applications that require low energy consumption, support for a high number of nodes, and large coverage range. Long range (LoRa) is one of the most successful LPWAN technologies, as it enables robust long-distance low power communications and it is proven to be effective in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as environmental monitoring and smart metering. LoRa is also promising for Industrial IoT scenarios, but its adoption is impaired by the relevant standardized medium access control protocol, LoRaWAN, that does not offer support to real-time data flows. For this reason, this article proposes RT-LoRa, a medium access strategy for LoRa that provides support for real-time flows, thus enabling the implementation of LoRa-based LPWAN for Industrial IoT applications. This article describes RT-LoRa, presents a simulative assessment in a realistic Industrial IoT scenario and provides some guidelines for the configuration of an RT-LoRa network.