Edge deduplication for LoRaWAN using network coding

LoRaWAN is a promising access technology for LPWAN IoT applications. However, the scalability of LoRaWAN has been debated due to its ALOHA-like media access mechanism. While using multiple gateways in the network can improve scalability, it may result in huge increase in traffic. This study presents a novel scheme to improve LoRaWAN scalability when multiple gateways are used without incurring excess backhaul traffic. The proposed scheme uses interflow network coding to encode traffic moving from gateways to network servers. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated via simulations. The results show that tremendous bandwidth savings can be achieved using the proposed scheme while allowing deploying more gateways to improve network scalability.