Int J Communication - 2022 - Lodhi - ND ADR Nondestructive Adaptive Data Rate For LoRaWAN Internet of Things

Received: 9 January 2022 Revised: 30 January 2022 Accepted: 10 February 2022
DOI: 10.1002/dac.5136
RESEARCH ARTICLE
ND-ADR: Nondestructive adaptive data rate for LoRaWAN

Internet of Things
Muhammad Ali Lodhi1 | Lei Wang1 | Arshad Farhad2
1
School of Software Technology, Dalian
University of Technology, Dalian, China
Summary
2
Department of Information and Typically, LoRaWAN utilizes an adaptive data rate (ADR) for resource
Communication Engineering, Chosun assignment (e.g., spreading factor and transmit power) to a large number of
University, Gwangju, South Korea
end devices (EDs). However, the slow adaptation of the spreading factor and
Correspondence transmitting power strategy makes the ADR vulnerable to destructive con-
Lei Wang, School of Software and the Key current transmissions, resulting in massive packet collision. Therefore, this
Laboratory of Ubiquitous Network and
Service Software of Liaoning Province,
paper analyzes the impact of massive concurrent transmissions and proposes
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian a novel “nondestructive adaptive data rate (ND-ADR)” approach to address
116024, China; Center of Underwater the packet collision problem. The proposed ND-ADR aims to monitor the
Robot, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen
518066, China.
destructive concurrent transmissions proactively and mitigate them by allo-
Email: lei.wang@dlut.edu.cn cating nondestructive transmission time to EDs. The proposed ND-ADR
ensures high robustness and reliability by reducing the chances of destruc-
Funding information
National Key Research and Development tive transmissions and retransmissions. Results show that the proposed ND-
Plan, Grant/Award Number: ADR outperforms the existing state-of-the-art ADRs in packet success ratio
2017YFC0821003-2; Dalian Science and
and energy consumption.
Technology Innovation Fund, Grant/
Award Number: 2019J11CY004
KEYWORDS
adaptive data rate, Internet of Things (IoT), Long Range (LoRA), LoRaWAN, spreading
factor
1 | INTRODUCTION
Massive sensor networks are the main engine to driving the Internet of Things (IoT) from environmental, home, mili-
tary, health, and other commercial areas.1 Battery-operated sensors are used across all industries2 to gather a massive
amount of critical data. There is always a big challenge in wireless communication related to power consumption and
communication. There are short-range technologies like WiFi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth in the pool of wireless technolo-
gies. Cellular networks (e.g., 3G, 4G, and 5G) are available to meet the market requirements based on the bandwidth
and long-range. However, these short-range (e.g., WiFi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth) and cellular technologies cannot fulfill
the need for lower power consumption over a long distance.3 Low power wide area network (LPWAN) is a new type of
wireless technology designed to transmit small data over long-range using low power, low bandwidth, and low bit rate
(e.g., 0.3 to 50 kbit/s) needed for robust IoT networks.
There are numbers of competing technologies in the LPWAN, such as narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT),4 Long Range
(LoRa),5 RPMA,6 Sigfox,7 and weightless.8 Therefore, the following listed unique features of LPWAN technologies make
it suitable for machine-to-machine and IoT needs.
(i) Long-range: LPWAN covers the long area over 2 km in an indoor area, and up to 10 km in a line of sight (LoS).9
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(ii) Low power and low cost: LPWAN offers a low bit rate and small data packet size. Also, it consumes low power to
transmit the data packet, increasing the battery life for several years, making it low cost solution for IoT
applications.10,11
LoRa is the emerging low power and long-range wireless technology, which defines the physical layer charac-
teristics, while LoRa wide area network (LoRaWAN) is the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol designed
to manage the resource allocation of end devices (EDs). In the LoRa network, EDs directly communicate with the
gateways (GWs) using spreading factors (SFs [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]), where GWs are connected with the network
server (NS), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 is composed of EDs, GWs, an NS, and several application servers. Different
applications are linked with one or more GWs through a bidirectional link. The uplink (UL) transmission defines
the communication from EDs to GWs and downlink (DL) transmission depicts acknowledgement (ACK) from GW
to EDs. An NS is the most powerful device in the network, responsible for managing the entire network, such as
resource assignment (e.g., using the adaptive data rate [ADR]) and ACK transmission. After receiving the packets
from the GWs, NS directs them to respective application servers. SF and transmit power (TP) are assigned to EDs
using an ADR, which is recommended for static applications, such as metering.12 Therefore, dynamic configuration
for the LoRaWAN network has been proposed in Slabicki et al13 and Farhad et al,14 to improve the scalability and
efficiency. However, ADR adopts transmission parameters (i.e., SF and TP) slowly, causing destructive concurrent
transmission, which is defined as when two or more transmissions occurring concurrently or slightly overlapping
with packet offset having the same transmission parameters (e.g., SF and channel). Furthermore, LoRaWAN only
supports a small number of EDs, which is insufficient to support potential applications of the LPWAN.15,16 There-
fore, this study proposes a novel “non-destructive ADR (ND-ADR)” approach. The proposed ND-ADR primarily
monitors the destructive concurrent transmissions and alleviates them by proactively assigning nondestructive trans-
mission time to ensure high scalability and reliability during the ongoing communication. The contributions of this
study are summarized as follows:
• The proposed ND-ADR is a new MAC protocol for nondestructive transmission time allocation to EDs. A prominent
feature of the proposed ND-ADR is to enable ED profiling, thereby grouping the EDs according to the same SF and
same transmission time, helping the NS to decide on new transmission parameters.
• We simulate and evaluate the performance of the LoRaWAN ADR using concurrent transmission with the same SF
and UL interval time, highlighting the issues concerning ADR (e.g., collision). Then, we propose a novel ND-ADR
approach to mitigate the collision.
FIGURE 1 The basic star-of-stars architecture of LoRaWAN

LODHI ET AL. 3 of 16
• The proposed ND-ADR improves the scalability of LoRaWAN network by proactively assigning a nondestructive
time to the EDs involved in the collision. This method reduces the extra burden of ED synchronization with the GW,
thereby reducing the extra energy consumption.
• The proposed ND-ADR improves the overall network performance due to the efficient allocation of the SF and TP
parameters compared with state-of-the-art ADRs in packet success ratio (PSR) and packet collision, which is caused
due to intra- and inter-SF interferences.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 highlights the state-of-the-art research efforts
related to scalability. Section 3 describes a network model and a simulation study of the considered scenario.
Section 4 presents the operation of the proposed ND-ADR. The simulation experiments, results, and performance
evaluation of the proposed ND-ADR in comparison with state-of-the-art ADRs is highlighted in Section 5. Section 6
concludes this paper.
2 | R E LA T E D WOR K
This section presents the existing efforts regarding collision issues in the LoRaWAN network.
Haxhibeqiri et al17 proposed a simulation model to investigate the scalability on a single GW and found
that the losses reached 32% when more than 1000 were used. Blenn and Kuipers18 captured the real-time
traffic of The Things Network (TTN) for 8 months and received 17,467,312 packets from 1618 EDs. While analyz-
ing the captured data, the authors found that EDs do not use the provided channels evenly, which leads to
packet loss.
To analyze the characteristic of the traffic in TTN, Rahmadhani and Kuipers19 captured the real-time traffic by
using the TTN application programming interface for June 2016 and observed the regular and irregular traffic
periods. From 1,616,500 received frames from 488 EDs, the authors found that around 93.7% of the traffic is
periodic.
Due to the Aloha based channel access mechanism of the LoRa, Haxhibeqiri et al17 modeled the channel access
mechanism using the simulator to assess the scalability. The authors concluded that if two packets are overlapping, the
GW will receive none of the packets correctly.
The lightweight scheduling for the LoRa networks was presented in Reynders et al20 to improve the scalability.
In their proposed work, the available bandwidth was divided into synchronous downlink channels and asynchro-
nous downlink/uplink channels. The GW used a synchronous downlink channel to update the EDs about the
transmission power and SF for uplink transmission. ED wakes up at the time of transmission, listens to the
updated information in synchronous downlink transmission, and then performs the transmission using ALOHA.
Although the proposed work improved the collision, there is still a collision of the beacons from the neighbouring
GWs, and also EDs need to listen to extra synchronous transmission overhead. To achieve the high scalability, S-
MAC adaptive scheduling21 was proposed, where periodic patterns of the transmission and orthogonality features
were utilized to assign the scheduling dynamically to each ED. Therefore, the proposed solution was compatible
with all LoRaWAN EDs. The author implemented the full-duplex mode to achieve high throughput and reduce
the collision.
The synchronization and scheduling mechanism was presented in Haxhibeqiri et al,22 where a central
network is being used to schedule the uplink and downlink transmission for each node based on the application.
Furthermore, the proposed work utilized the bloom filter, a particular probabilistic data structure for scheduling.
Therefore, the same slot was assigned to multiple nodes due to the probabilistic structure, eliminating the
collision.
Previous research13,14 considered SF distribution schemes based on the distance and achieved the significant
improvement in delivery ratio and energy. However, their proposed schemes only used the SF and did not consider the
concurrent transmissions.
3 | NETWORK M ODEL
In this section, essential network characteristics, assumptions, and definitions are discussed.
3.1 | Preliminaries
The EDs are scattered randomly around a single GW in a static environment. It is assumed that a fixed UL
transmission time ðT txtime ½t 1 , t 2 , …, t n Þ is assigned to each ED involved in communication. We also assume that
different SFs ðSF ½7, 8, 9, 10, 11,12Þ with the same channel (ch ½868:1, 868:3, 868:5 MHz) are orthogonal.15,23
We assume only class A EDs due to their applicability for the IoT low power applications. This work considers smart
city (e.g., city waste management) application owing to its regular traffic with 24 packets/day and 30 bytes of
packet size.24
3.2 | Problem formulation with considered scenario
The frame exchange procedure in LoRaWAN is shown in Figure 2, where st, et, and ToA represent the start, end, and
time-on-air of the frame, respectively. Every ED has a predetermined transmission time, random channel, and an SF
assigned by the ADR through a DL MAC command. Therefore, when ED reaches the T txtime , it starts transmission with-
out checking the channel availability. Therefore, different scenarios occur in UL transmission in LoRaWAN, as shown
in Figure 3.
8
< 0, ifðst j ⩽ st i ⩽ et j OR st i ⩽ st j ⩽ et i Þ
>
OðSF i , SF j Þ ¼ AND ðSF i ¼ SFjÞ AND ðchi ¼ chj Þ ð1Þ
>
:
1, otherwise:
(i) Scenario 1:
When two transmissions coincide or with some offset of the packet by using the different channels and different or
same SF, it is considered concurrent transmission, highlighted in scenario 1. In this scenario, two EDs using the
FIGURE 2 Frame exchange procedure between ED and GW
FIGURE 3 Packets overlap scenarios over the same SF and channel

channels (868.3, 868.5) and SF (SF9, SF10), respectively, transmitting simultaneously and GW receiving both the
transmissions correctly.
(ii) Scenario 2:
In this scenario, two EDs start transmitting simultaneously with the same channel and the same SF. It is consid-
ered to be a destructive concurrent transmission, leading to packet collision due to overlapping, as shown in
Figure 3. The UL transmissions of both EDs 1 and 3 collide due to the same SF. This situation happens when ADR
assigns the SF without monitoring the destructive transmissions.
3.3 | Performance analysis
Here, we analyze the considered scenario in the network simulator (ns-3). Further, we focus on highlighting a required
and acceptable transmission margin for a packet to be successfully received. Equation (1) describes the margins of the
overlapping between two transmissions. The OðSF i , SF j Þ ¼ 0 in Equation (1) shows that overlapping has occurred with
the same SF of EDs i and j, where st of i lies between the st or et of j or vice versa. Thus, every time these EDs choose
the same channel and same SF, a collision always occur. Similar findings related to collision is presented in Haxhibeqiri
et al,17 where the author claimed that when the delay between two concurrent transmissions is less than 87%, then UL
transmissions suffer from collision.
We performed experiments to evaluate the margin between the destructive concurrent transmissions. First, the mar-
gin between concurrent transmissions were set from 500 to 2000 ms. The rest of the details are shown in Table 1. The
results of the scenario (S1) in Figure 4A reveals that the same transmission time and high SF (ADR utilizes SF12 as ini-
tial SF) lead to destructive interference. As a result, huge packet loss is observed. When the margin was increased grad-
ually from 500 to 2000 ms, then the performance of the PSR improved significantly, as shown in Figure 4B. In addition,
if the margin between concurrent transmissions is equal to or less than the ToA, then the packet loss increases due to
TABLE 1 Different scenarios describing the margin between the two or more transmissions, using EDs = 400, SF = 12, and random
channel
Scenario # S1 S2 S3 S4 S5
Tx time TX1:to, TX2:to TX1:to, TX2:to+500 TX1:to, TX2:to+1000 TX1:to, TX2:to+1500 TX1:to, TX2:to+2000
FIGURE 4 Packet success ratio (PSR) and packet loss ratio (PLR) of a different margin between the transmissions
collision. Further, it was found that packets collide due to the collision with the preamble or bad cyclic redundancy
check (CRC).
3.4 | Issues
(i) Packet loss: Through simulation results, we observed that ADR assigns the same SF, causing destructive concurrent
transmissions. As a result, this situation leads to massive packet loss.
(ii) Interference: We observed that ADR suffers from high interference when packets transmitted with the same SF
(higher SF) over the same channel. In such a situation, overlapping between these packets occur at the GW. Since
higher SF (e.g., 10, 11, and 12) in the LoRaWAN is vulnerable to both intra- and inter-SF interferences.25–29
To resolve the above-mentioned highlighted issues, we propose a novel nondestructive adaptive data rate (ND-
ADR) to monitor the destructive concurrent transmissions and mitigate them by proactively assigning nondestructive
transmission time to EDs for ongoing communication to ensure high scalability and reliability.
4 | WORKI N G OF TH E PROPOSE D ND- A DR
Figure 5 depicts the working procedure of the proposed ND-ADR approach. Note that we do not change the working of
the typical ADR, but we enhance it by adding the proposed work. Primarily, the proposed ND-ADR is divided into three
phases: Maintaining the arrival time of consecutive transmissions, ED profiling, and alleviating the destructive trans-
missions. These phases are described in the remainder of this section.
4.1 | Maintaining the arrival time of consecutive transmissions
Consecutive transmissions are defined as the consecutive unique packets, arriving at the NS. The NS calculates the
arrival time of the packet (T a ), as shown in Equation (2). Further, the ToA and preamble length of packet size 30 bytes
with bandwidth (BW) of 125 kHz is highlighted in Table 2.
T a ¼ T txtime þ ToA, ð2Þ
FIGURE 5 Flow diagram of the proposed ND-ADR
TABLE 2 ToA of the EDs with packet size 30 [bytes] and 125 kHz bandwidth
SF 7 8 9 10 11 12
ToA (ms) 61.70 113.15 205.82 411.65 823.30 1646.59
Preamble length 12.54 25.09 50.18 100.35 200.70 401.41
Table 3 lists the symbols utilized in the proposed ND-ADR. As shown in Algorithm 1, each ED transmits
two types of UL transmission, one is regular transmission, and the second is a retransmission ðretxÞ.
Regular transmission is termed as “first transmission” initiated by an ED in a UL direction, while a retx is performed
when an ED has failed to receive an ACK from NS regarding every UL packet in the two receive windows (there are
maximum 8 transmission attempts in the confirmed mode of LoRaWAN). The primary objective of this phase is to
find the consecutive transmissions at the NS for every regular UL packet transmission
from each ED and store them in
a pair for later use to find the T txtime . Initially, the expected packet Pexp (i.e., an NS server is expecting a UL packet
from ED) and CT are initialized to 1 and false, respectively. When a GW receives a packet completely, it forwards the
T a along with the packet to the NS. When ðPno ¼¼ Pexp Þ, then the NS stores the T a and considers it as T af irst .
After updating the T af irst and CT, NS waits for the second packet (T asecond ). In the case NS failed to receive the
expected packet (Pexp ), it would be considered as lost ðPlost Þ. The algorithm maintains LCT to store the T a of packet
1 (P1) and packet 2 (P2) in a pair like (T aP1 , T aP2 ) and so on. If the NS failed to receive packet 3 (P3), the NS skips P3
and moves forward to the new pair (T aP4 , T aP5 ) for packets 4 and 5, respectively. Further, the complexity of
Algorithm 1 is Oð1Þ.
TABLE 3 Symbols utilized in the Proposed ND-ADR approach
Symbols Description
CT A boolean value, which helps to find the consecutive transmissions
T txtime Transmission time of each transmitting ED
Ta Arrival time of the received packet at the GW
T af irst Arrival time of the first consecutive received packet
T asecond Arrival time of the second consecutive received packet
T margin Time margin between concurrent transmissions
T total Total margin time
P Transmitted packet
LCT A list containing CT in a pair (e.g., (P1, P2) and (P3, P4))
S Size of the list LCT
LT txtime A list containing the transmission time of each ED
Pno Received packet number
Pexp Expected packet, NS is anticipating from the EDs
Plost Lost packet
RX Packet reception
4.2 | End device profiling
ED profiling is another feature of the proposed ND-ADR, enabling the NS to maintain the EDs based on their SF. After
gathering the consecutive transmissions time of each ED, NS places the EDs in a group having the same SF. EDs profil-
ing aims to find concurrent transmissions occurring with the same SF over the same channel. The structure of the
grouping is shown in Figure 5, where NS stores ID, SF, and transmission time (TX time) of the ED. If SF of any ED
changes during communication, NS moves the corresponding ED to the respective group.
4.3 | Assignment of nondestructive transmission time
After estimating the transmission time using Equations (3) and (4), the NS allocates the SF, TP, and nondestructive
ðT txtime Þ by running the ADR. To assign the nondestructive ðT txtime , the NS first finds the minimum ½min, and
maximum ½maxÞ margin between the two concurrent transmissions. As discussed in Section 3, that if the margin
between two simultaneous transmissions is more than their ToAðmax > ToAÞ, then both transmissions can be
demodulated successfully. We consider the 100% margin between concurrent transmissions, which is computed using
Equation (3).
T margin ¼ jT txtimeðiÞ T txtimeðjÞ j, ð3Þ

0, if min < T margin < max
DT ¼ ð4Þ
1, otherwise
min ¼ 0, max ¼ ToA: ð5Þ
The proposed ND-ADR in Algorithm 2 estimates the transmission time of each ED and assigns the new T txtime in
case of concurrent transmissions. The algorithm is divided into three portions, and each portion performs a
different task.
Portion 1 starts from lines (1–4), which stores the transmission time using a list ðLT txtime Þ. For this, NS picks the pair
of each consecutive transmission from the ðLCT Þ which is gathered in Algorithm 1 and calculates the difference. It is
the same technique used by Blenn and Kuipers18 to calculate the T txtime from the dataset. In portion 2, from lines (6–9),
NS calculates a suitable SF, TP, and T txtime by applying the modulus operation on LT txtime . In the last portion, from line
9, the NS ensures the concurrent transmission with the new assigned SF. To ensure this, NS performs an iterative oper-
ation to find the EDs having the same SF ðSF ðiÞ ¼¼ SF ðjÞ Þ and calculates the total time difference ðT total Þ. If the condi-
tion ðabsðT txtimeðiÞ ;T txtimeðjÞ ÞÞ holds, then based on the T total , the NS allocates the new T txtime to ED and informs the ED
using DL MAC command. When the ED receives the DL MAC command from NS, ED updates the transmissions
parameters (e.g., SF, TP, and T txtime ) and continue transmissions with newly assigned parameters. The overall complex-
ity of Algorithm 2 is Oðn2 Þ.
5 | EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A ND ANALYSIS
In this section, the performance of the ND-ADR approach is evaluated and compared with the existing ADRs (Table 4),
such as typical ADR,12 ADR+,13 and Gaussian-based ADR.14
TABLE 4 Constraints of the proposed ND-ADR and existing ADR approaches with confirmed mode
Year Scheme ADR type Simulation environment Initial DR

2017/2020 Typical ADR of LoRaWAN 12
ED- and NS-sides Static EDs DR = 0
2018 ADR+13 NS side Static EDs DR = 0
2020 Gaussian-ADR (G-ADR)14 NS-side Static and mobile EDs DR = 0
- Proposed ND-ADR NS-side Static EDs DR = 0
5.1 | Existing ADRs
Here, we present the existing ADRs, considered for comparison with ND-ADR.
5.1.1 | Typical ADR12
When an ED enables the ADR bit in the UL packet, it shows that NS is responsible to manage the transmission parame-
ters (e.g., SF and TP). In this case, upon the reception of UL packet, NS is responsible to monitor the SNR of the M
packets (i.e., M = 20). When NS reaches M, it chooses the highest SNR value for deciding a suitable SF and TP. Once
the typical ADR identifies these parameters, the NS transmits them in a MAC command LinkADRReq as unconfirmed
DL (i.e., no ACK notification is required from the corresponding ED)
5.1.2 | Average-based daptive data rate (ADR+)
It works the same as typical ADR; however, instead of choosing the highest value of the SNR among M packets, it takes
the average of the SNRs of the M packets to decide the required SF and TP.
5.1.3 | Gaussian-based adaptive data rate (G-ADR)
Upon the reception of M packets by the NS, the G-ADR is commenced by calculating the mean (μ) and variance (σ)
using Equations (6) and (7), respectively.
1X M
μ¼ SNRi , ð6Þ
M i¼0
1 X M
σ2 ¼ ðSNRi μÞ2 , ð7Þ
M 1 i¼0
where i is the number of packets. The G-ADR accepts the centralized SNR values in the effective range of μ + σ and
μ σ. Therefore, the SNR value is estimated by averaging the values that are in the effective range.
5.2 | Simulation environment
In this study, the simulation is performed using ns-3,30 where EDs are randomly deployed in a 5-km coverage area.31
The simulation is run multiple times, and average results are presented. The rest of the simulation parameters utilized
in this work is outlined in Table 5.
5.3 | Performance indicators
This study evaluates the performance of the ND-ADR and standard ADR in terms of destructive overlapping (DO),
PSR, PLR, and energy consumption. These performance1 metrics are discussed as below.
5.3.1 | DO
• DO transmissions (DOtx ): It is defined as the number of transmissions arriving at the GW, while GW is already trans-
mitting the same transmission parameters, causing collision.
TABLE 5 Parameters utilized in simulation
Parameters Value
Simulation time 24 h
Numbers of GWs 1
PL [bytes] 30
Maximum UL transmission limit 8
GW Duty cycle ON
Transmission Type Bidirectional (UL and DL)
Receive Window 2 (RX2) SF 12
Receive Window 2 (RX2) Channel 869.525 MHz
GW antenna height (m) 1531
ED antenna height (m) 1.231
Transmit power (dBm) 214
Initial SF assignment to ED 1232
FIGURE 6 Collision in ADR, ADR+, G-ADR, and ND-ADR with destructive overlapping (DO) transmissions
• DO time (DOt ): It is defined as the average time, describing the duration of DOtx , interrupting the receiving transmis-
sion at GW.
The results in Figure 6 depict the maximum, minimum, and average DOt . It can be seen that ADR, ADR+, and G-
ADR has the highest mean value of DOtx compared with the ND-ADR due to the massive numbers of concurrent trans-
missions. In contrast, ND-ADR performs efficiently by detecting and mitigating concurrent transmissions. Figure 7
shows the impact of average DOt . It can be seen that SF 12 suffers from high DOt compared with other SF owing to high
ToA. However, ND-ADR outperforms the ADR since ND-ADR allocates nondestructive transmission based on the DOt .
Further, DOt is mainly caused due to massive retransmissions.
5.3.2 | PSR
In this study, PSR is termed when both ED and NS receive DL (ACK) and UL packets, respectively, in one of the avail-
able receive windows. NS transmit the confirmation (ACK) against each received packet to the corresponding ED as
DL (i.e., unconfirmed, which means that the NS does not require any ACK in return from the ED). The DL ACK is sent
FIGURE 7 Average overlap time between different SFs: (A) in ADR and (B) ND-ADR
FIGURE 8 The per-hour PSR of ADR, ADR+, G-ADR and ND-ADR with PL = 30 B and 100 packets/day: (A) RX1, (B) RX2
using receive window (RX1) or receives window (RX2). In RX1, NS uses the same transmission parameters (e.g., the
same channel with the same SF) for DL ACK. If ED misses the ACK in RX1, it opens RX2 using a dedicated channel
(869.5 MHz) and fixes SF (SF 12). Figure 8 shows the per hour PSR and convergence time of ADR, ADR+, G-ADR, and
ND-ADR for RX1 and RX2 with 30 bytes of packet size for one day of simulation time with offered traffic of 38,400
packets. The RX2 performs better than RX1 because of less DL collision due to the dedicated channel.33 It can be seen
that ND-ADR in both scenarios (RX1 and RX2) perform significantly better compared with other ADR approaches.
Moreover, average PSR improvement for similar scenarios for different ADR approaches is presented in Table 6. It can
be seen that the proposed ND-ADR outperforms the state-of-the-art ADR variants.
In the case of existing ADRs in both scenarios (i.e., RX1 and RX2), the performance is lower than the proposed ND-
ADR, owing to detecting destructive concurrent transmissions and assigning the nondestructive transmissions to the
EDs. On the other hand, other schemes cause the collision due to simultaneous transmissions, increasing ret-
ransmissions from EDs, thus decreasing the overall network performance.
TABLE 6 PSR improvements of EDs for ND-ADR and state-of-the-art ADR approaches with packet size 30 [bytes] and 125 kHz
bandwidth
RX1 RX2
EDs ADR ADR+ G-ADR ND-ADR ADR ADR+ G-ADR ND-ADR

200 - +11.10% +17.31% +25.72% - +17.27% +25.0% +29.99%
400 - +6.47% +14.57% +19.92% - +21.01% +23.62% +34.46%
600 - +7.94% +16.49% +25.05% - +21.15% +27.58% +40.00%
800 - +6.74% +12.71% +22.23% - +14.05% +30.52% +35.23%
1000 - +6.52% +13.61% +21.38% - +13.58% +21.65% +33.71%
FIGURE 9 Analysis of PSR and PLR with PL = 30 B and 100 packets/day
5.3.3 | Packet loss ratio (PLR)
PLR is composed of four categories14,31:
• PLR due to undersensitivity (PLR-S): When a packet arrives at the GW under the required sensitivity threshold.
• PLR due to interference (PLR-I): When two or more packets transmitted with the same SF over the same channel
collide. In such a case, a packet is dropped when the cumulative power after equalization is greater than 6 dB.25 The
term “equalization” refers to the process of multiplying SNR of an interferer signal with overlapping time, divided by
the duration of the desired signal.25
• PLR due to DL ACK transmission DL (PLR-T): In LoRaWAN, GW is half-duplex, when GW is in transmitting mode
(sending ACK), it cannot receive the UL (from ED) simultaneously.
• PLR due to the busy receiver (PLR-R): When all the reception paths (at the GW) are engaged in demodulating the
incoming packets from the ED.
The average PLRs are shown in Figure 9 for different numbers of EDs. It can be observed that when EDs or offered
traffic increase, the average PLR also increases. This is because (1) when the number of EDs increases, there is a high
probability of concurrent transmissions, causing PLR-I. (2) Due to the half-duplex mode, GW cannot receive the incom-
ing packets while transmitting ACK, leading to PLR-T. The GW is designed to receive parallel transmissions simulta-
neously (up to 8), but when GW deals with the massive UL traffic, it could not respond appropriately, resulting in
PLR-R. In response to PLR, more traffic would be caused due to the retransmissions, affecting the network perfor-
mance. Furthermore, in Figure 10, when RX2 is used instead of RX1, then less PLR-R is observed due to the dedicated
DL channel. Conversely, ND-ADR responds well compared with the ADR due to fewer packet losses, resulting in
reduced retransmissions.
5.3.4 | Energy consumption in joules (J)
Figure 11 presents the energy consumption of ND-ADR and other existing ADRs for different number of EDs. Nor-
mally, EDs consume different amounts of energy in sleeping, transmitting, receiving, and idle modes. The work
FIGURE 10 Analysis of PSR and PLR with PL = 30 B and 100 packets/day
FIGURE 11 Average energy consumption for ADR, ADR+, G-ADR, and ND-ADR: (A) RX1 and (B) RX2
considers the amount of energy consumed in the transmission and reception modes, as the impact of energy consumed
in sleeping and idle modes are negligible. Therefore, average energy consumption in (Joules) is computed as the total
energy consumed during transmission divided by the total number of packets received successfully.
The impact of energy consumption in the case of ADR is high compared with the ND-ADR. It is because the energy
consumption in LoRaWAN is primarily based on the selection of SF. High SF (e.g., SF 11 and SF 12) consumes more
energy than other SFs due to high ToA.34 Another reason for this high energy consumption is the number of ret-
ransmissions. More retransmissions from ED lead to high energy consumption. However, in ND-ADR, the impact of
energy consumption is low due to the reduced number of retransmissions. Therefore, it is evident that ND-ADR per-
forms effectively and outperforms ADR in energy consumption.
6 | C ON C L U S I ON
The typical ADR of LoRaWAN is responsible for assigning a resource to EDs, owing to slow adaptation of the resource
assignment, leading to destructive concurrent transmissions. Therefore, it leads to massive packet loss. To mitigate the
collision issue, we proposed ND-ADR by proactively monitoring the destructive concurrent transmissions and alleviat-
ing them by allocating nondestructive transmission time and a best spreading factor along with transmit power before
every uplink transmission. As a result, we observed massive collisions in ADR through simulation results, while ND-
ADR reduced this impact by allocating nondestructive transmission time along with SF and TP. Further, results rev-
ealed that the ND-ADR enhances the PSR and energy consumption compared with state-of-the-art ADRs. Therefore,
we believe that the proposed ND-ADR can be adopted for applications requiring high efficiency, reliability, PSR, and
low energy consumption.
A C K N O WL E D G M E N T S
This work was supported in part by the “National Key Research and Development Plan” under Grant
2017YFC0821003-2 and in part by the “Dalian Science and Technology Innovation Fund” under Grant 2019J11CY004.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.
ORCID
Muhammad Ali Lodhi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9070-6271
Lei Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1810-3019
Arshad Farhad https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2153-993X
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How to cite this article: Lodhi MA, Wang L, Farhad A. ND-ADR: Nondestructive adaptive data rate for
LoRaWAN Internet of Things. Int J Commun Syst. 2022;35(9):e5136. doi:10.1002/dac.5136

Int J Communication - 2022 - Lodhi - ND ADR Nondestructive Adaptive Data Rate For LoRaWAN Internet of Things

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Received: 9 January 2022 Revised: 30 January 2022 Accepted: 10 February 2022

ND-ADR: Nondestructive adaptive data rate for LoRaWAN

Muhammad Ali Lodhi1 | Lei Wang1 | Arshad Farhad2

FIGURE 1 The basic star-of-stars architecture of LoRaWAN

3.2 | Problem formulation with considered scenario

FIGURE 2 Frame exchange procedure between ED and GW

FIGURE 3 Packets overlap scenarios over the same SF and channel

3.3 | Performance analysis

4 | WORKI N G OF TH E PROPOSE D ND- A DR

4.1 | Maintaining the arrival time of consecutive transmissions

T a ¼ T txtime þ ToA, ð2Þ

FIGURE 5 Flow diagram of the proposed ND-ADR

TABLE 3 Symbols utilized in the Proposed ND-ADR approach

4.2 | End device profiling

4.3 | Assignment of nondestructive transmission time

T margin ¼ jT txtimeðiÞ T txtimeðjÞ j, ð3Þ

min ¼ 0, max ¼ ToA: ð5Þ

5 | EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A ND ANALYSIS

Year Scheme ADR type Simulation environment Initial DR

5.1 | Existing ADRs

5.1.1 | Typical ADR12

5.1.2 | Average-based daptive data rate (ADR+)

5.1.3 | Gaussian-based adaptive data rate (G-ADR)

5.2 | Simulation environment

5.3 | Performance indicators

TABLE 5 Parameters utilized in simulation

EDs ADR ADR+ G-ADR ND-ADR ADR ADR+ G-ADR ND-ADR

FIGURE 9 Analysis of PSR and PLR with PL = 30 B and 100 packets/day

5.3.3 | Packet loss ratio (PLR)

PLR is composed of four categories14,31:

5.3.4 | Energy consumption in joules (J)

FIGURE 10 Analysis of PSR and PLR with PL = 30 B and 100 packets/day

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

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