Mid Sweden University

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm contaminated industrial world, allowing for innovative services. The wireless communications seem to be particularly attracting, especially when complement indoor and outdoor Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) for geo-referencing smart objects (e.g. for asset tracking). In this paper, the LoRaWAN solution is considered for transmitting RTLS data. LoRaWAN is an example of Low Power Wide Area Network: it tradeoffs throughput with coverage and power consumption. However, performance can be greatly improved with limited changes to the standard specifications. In this work, a scheduling layer is suggested above the regular stack for allocating communication resources in a time slot channel hopping medium access strategy. The main innovation is the time synchronization, which is obtained opportunistically from the ranging devices belonging to the RTLSs. The experimental testbed, based on commercially available solutions, demonstrates the affordability and feasibility of the proposed approach. When low-cost GPS (outdoor) and UWB (indoor) ranging devices are considered, synchronization error of few microseconds can be easily obtained. The experimental results show the that time reference pulses disciplined by GPS have a maximum jitter of 180 ns and a standard deviation of 40 ns whereas, if time reference pulses disciplined by UWB are considered, the maximum jitter is 3.3 μs and the standard deviation is 0.7 μs.