Vázquez, Toni AdameBarrachina Muñoz, SergioBellalta, BorisBel, Albert2020-04-062020-04-062018Vázquez TA, Barrachina Muñoz S, Bellalta B, Bel A. HARE: supporting efficient uplink multi-hop communications in self-organizing LPWANs. Sensors. 2018 Jan 3;18(1):115. DOI: 10.3390/s180101151424-8220http://hdl.handle.net/10230/44166The 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.application/pdfeng© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s18010115LPWANIoTM2MMulti-hopPower saving mechanismsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess