Title: HARE: Supporting efficient uplink multi-hop communications in self-organizing LPWANs,
Abstract: The emergence of low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) as a new agent in the
Internet of Things (IoT) will result in the incorporation into the digital
world of low-automated processes from a wide variety of sectors. The single-hop
conception of typical LPWAN deployments, though simple and robust, overlooks
the self-organization capabilities of network devices, suffers from lack of
scalability in crowded scenarios, and pays little attention to energy
consumption. Aimed to take the most out of devices' capabilities, the HARE
protocol stack is proposed in this paper as a new LPWAN technology flexible
enough to adopt uplink multi-hop communications when proving energetically more
efficient. In this way, results from a real testbed show energy savings of up
to 15% when using a multi-hop approach while keeping the same network
reliability. System's self-organizing capability and resilience have been also
validated after performing numerous iterations of the association mechanism and
deliberately switching off network devices.