CRT-LoRa: An efficient and reliable MAC scheme for real-time industrial applications

LoRa is a well-established wireless technology in the field of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocols, providing radio coverage of several kilometers and extremely low power consumption. However, its medium access protocol, the LoRaWAN MAC protocol, is not suitable for industrial applications. To address this limitation, several alternative protocols, such as Industrial LoRa and RT-LoRa, have been proposed to support reliable and real-time communication between sensor nodes. In this paper, we present CRT-LoRa, a novel MAC strategy that improves the performance of LoRa by introducing a coding transmission scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). We evaluated the performance of CRT-LoRa through an extensive simulation campaign in OMNeT++. Our simulation results, partially reported in this paper, indicate that CRT-LoRa achieves a lower packet loss rate and energy consumption than RT-LoRa under similar conditions and simulation scenarios.