A study of clear channel assessment performance for low power wide area networks

Low power wide area (LPWA) networks are power-constrained and work on industrial, scientific, medical (ISM) bands. The scheme of clear channel assessment (CCA) has a great influence on network performance, and the most important characteristics of CCA methods for LPWA networks are high detection probability and power saving. For different wireless networks, carrier sensing (CS), one of the CCA methods, is various due to respective modulations and wireless techniques. In this paper, we modify some parameters of CS in IEEE 802.15.4 to be suitable for LPWA networks. Also, we take the particular case of the LPWA networks based on IEEE 802.15.4k standard to simulate the performance of popular CCA methods (Energy Detection and Carrier Sensing). By analyzing the performance of CCA methods, some conclusions are drawn about how to select an appropriate CCA method for LPWA networks according to channel qualities.