Luca belönad med Best Student Journal Paper Award
Dr. Luca Beltramelli, tidigare doktorand vid Mittuniversitetet, blev belönad för Best Student Journal Paper Award på konferensen IEEE Sweden VT-COM-IT Joint Chapter. Det var i tuff konkurrens som Lucas arbete blev presenterat som Top nominated papers 2022.
Intervju med Luca:
How does it feel to get this award?
It is extremely rewording to receive an award for this paper. It is especially nice to receive this award now, two years after completing my PhD studies and after deciding to continue my career outside of academia. This paper is one of the last few on which I worked during my final year as PhD student at Mid Sweden University. One over which I spent a significant amount of time and energies, and which brings back nice memories.
What is your paper about?
The paper investigates the performance of the LoRa wireless technology. LoRa is one of the Low Power Wide Area Networks technologies that has received a lot of attention in recent years. The paper proposes an analytical model to characterize LoRa’s performance in terms of throughput and energy efficiency under different types of channel access mechanisms.
How did you receive the award?
The conference was held remotely, the winner of the award was announced at the end of the conference. The winner was selected from the short list of nominated papers by an International Awards Committee of the Chapter.
What does an award like this mean to you?
It is very meaningful to me. I was very pleased to have an opportunity to present this journal paper in front of an audience of colleagues and expert from all Sweden. Receiving this award now after two years from my dissertation was especially gratifying and positively reminded me of the time spent at Miun during my PhD studies.
After your dissertation you started a position at Ericsson, what are you working on there today?
I started working in Ericsson in September 2021, I am currently employed as system developer for 5G Cloud RAN Network Automation.
Anything else you like to add?
I would like to thank my supervisors, co-authors and colleagues from Mid Sweden University, they have helped me immensely not only during the process of writing this paper but throughout the entirety of my PhD studies.
The award-winning journal paper
Title: “LoRa Beyond ALOHA: An Investigation of Alternative Random Access Protocols,”
Authors: L. Beltramelli, A. Mahmood, P. Österberg and M. Gidlund
In: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 3544-3554, May 2021
Abstract
In this article, we present a stochastic geometry-based model to investigate alternative medium access choices for LoRaWAN-a widely adopted low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology for the Internet-of-Things. LoRaWAN adoption is driven by its simplified network architecture, air interface, and medium access. The physical layer, known as Long Range (LoRa), provides quasi-orthogonal virtual channels through spreading factors (SFs) and time-power capture gains. However, the adopted pure ALOHA access mechanism suffers, in terms of scalability, under the same-channel same-SF transmissions from a large number of devices. In this article, our objective is to explore access mechanisms beyond-ALOHA for LoRaWAN. Using recent results on time- and power-capture effects of LoRa, we develop a unified model for the comparative study of other choices, i.e., slotted ALOHA and carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA). The model includes the necessary design parameters of these access mechanisms, such as guard time and synchronization accuracy for slotted ALOHA, carrier sensing threshold for CSMA. It also accounts for the spatial interaction of devices in annular shaped regions, characteristic of LoRa, for CSMA. The performance metrics derived from the model in terms of coverage probability, channel throughput, and energy efficiency are validated using Monte-Carlo simulations. Our analysis shows that slotted ALOHA indeed has higher reliability than pure ALOHA but at the cost of lower energy efficiency for low device densities. Whereas, CSMA outperforms slotted ALOHA at smaller SFs in terms of reliability and energy efficiency, with its performance degrading to pure ALOHA at higher SFs.