Network-Coding-based Forwarding for LoRaWAN Gateways

Abstract: LoRaWAN is a promising IoT access technology that is growing in popularity. This study addresses the issue of duplicate packets forwarding by LoRaWAN gateways and proposes a novel forwarding scheme to eliminate forwarding duplicate packets by utilizing inter-flow network coding. The proposed scheme is distributed and requires no coordination between gateways. The proposed scheme is evaluated under different network and traffic conditions. The results show that substantial savings can be achieved in bandwidth leading to enhanced scalability of the network without increasing outgoing traffic.