SCAP SigFox: A Scalable Communication Protocol for Low-Power Wide-Area IoT Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new future technology that is aimed at connecting billions of physical-world objects to the IT infrastructure via a wireless medium. Many radio access technologies exist, but few address the requirements of IoT applications such as low cost, low energy consumption, and long range. Low-Power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies, especially SigFox, have a low data rate that makes them suitable for IoT applications, especially since the lower the data rate, the longer the usable distance for the radio link. SigFox technology achieves as a main objective network reliability by striving for the successful delivery of data messages through redundancy. Doing so results in one of the SigFox weaknesses, namely the high collision rate, which questions SigFox scalability. In this work, we aimed at avoiding collisions by changing SigFox’s Aloha-based medium access protocol to TDMA and by using only orthogonal channels while removing redundancy. Consequently, every node sends a single copy of the data message on a given orthogonal channel in a specific time slot. To achieve this, we implemented a slot- and channel-allocation protocol (SCAP) on top of SigFox. In other words, our goal was to improve SigFox’s scalability by implementing two mechanisms: time slot allocation and channel allocation. Performance analysis was conducted on large networks with sizes ranging from 1000 to 10,000 nodes to evaluate both technologies: the original SigFox and SCAP SigFox. The simulation results showed that SCAP SigFox highly reduced the probability of collision and energy consumption when compared to the original SigFox. Additionally, SCAP SigFox had a greater throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR).