Battery-Less LoRaWAN Network using Energy Harvesting: Improving Network Throughput

Recently, LoRaWAN has become the most employed Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) for a wide range of Internet of Thing (IoT) applications. The main power source for IoT nodes are batteries. However, such disposable power sources are short-lived and impact the environment. In addition, battery replacement is costly and dangerous in some applications, where nodes are located in hard-to-reach areas. Battery-less nodes equipped with energy harvesting impose themselves as a promising environmental friendly solution for a sustainable IoT. In this paper, we propose an optimization problem to find the suitable capacitor and packet generation rate which ensures that the battery-less node can effectively perform its tasks using the harvested energy. Then, we devise an algorithm for improving the throughput of LoRaWAN networks with battery-less nodes. Numerical examples validate the effectiveness of our algorithm where we obtained a tiny capacitor size and packet arrival rate suitable for IoT applications. Furthermore, our proposed approach enhances the network throughput and the packet delivery ratio compared to Legacy LoRaWAN and other state-of-the-art algorithms.