Mid Sweden University

One of the most widespread applications of IoT technologies is smart metering. Despite remote metering in smart grids is not a novelty, the advent of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) wireless technologies allowed to extend the concept to gas and water distribution. However, these battery-supplied meters must ensure an operating lifetime longer than 10 years without any maintenance, thus leading to battery oversizing. This work focuses on LoRaWAN and proposes an innovative adaptive strategy for equalizing the message time duration in order to maximize the battery exploitation. A simulator has been purposely designed to evaluate the performance in a real-world scenario, considering a node density of hundreds of nodes per square km. The simulation results demonstrate that a better exploitation of the battery is possible, ensuring an increase by 10 times of the amount of the amount of useful user data bytes transferred by meters. © 2020 IEEE.