Lessons Learned on the Design of a Predictive Agent for LoRaWAN Network Planning

Celia Garrido-Hidalgo, Jonathan Fürst, Luis Roda-Sanchez, Teresa Olivares, Antonio Fernández-Caballero

Abstract: LoRaWAN is a low-power wide-area network standard widely used for long-range machine-to-machine communications in the Internet of Things ecosystem. While enabling ultra-low-power communication links, its open nature impulsed exponential market growth in the last years. Given its Aloha-like medium access nature, several scalability-oriented improvements were proposed in the last years, with time-slotted communications having raised special interest. However, how to efficiently allocate resources in a network where the cost of downlink communication is significantly higher than that of the uplink represents a significant challenge. To shed light on this matter, this work proposes the use of multi-agent systems for network planning in time-slotted communications. To do so, a predictive network planning agent is designed and validated as part of an end-to-end multi-agent network management system, which is based on multi-output regression that predicts the resulting network scalability for a given set of joining devices and setup scenarios being considered. A preliminary evaluation of network-status predictions showed a mean absolute error lower than 3% and pointed out different lessons learned, in turn validating the feasibility of the proposed agent for LoRaWAN-oriented network planning.