PolarTracker: Attitude-aware Channel Access for Floating Low Power Wide Area Networks

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Long Range (LoRa) show great potential in emerging aquatic IoT applications. However, our deployment experience shows that the floating LPWAN suffer significant performance degradation, compared to the static terrestrial deployments. Our measurement results reveal the reason behind this is due to the polarization and directivity of the antenna. The dynamic attitude of a floating node incurs varying signal strength losses, which is ignored by the attitude-oblivious link model adopted in most of the existing methods. When accessing the channel at a misaligned attitude, packet errors can happen. In this paper, we propose an attitude-aware link model that explicitly quantifies the impact of node attitude on link quality. Based on the new model, we propose PolarTracker, a novel channel access method for floating LPWAN. PolarTracker tracks the node attitude alignment state and schedules the transmissions into the aligned periods with better link quality. We implement a prototype of PolarTracker on commercial LoRa platforms and extensively evaluate its performance in various real-world environments. The experimental results show that PolarTracker can efficiently improve the packet reception ratio by 48.8%, compared with ALOHA in LoRaWAN.