  Long range radio communication is preferred in many IoT deployments as it
avoids the complexity of multi-hop wireless networks. LoRa is a popular,
energy-efficient wireless modulation but its networking substrate LoRaWAN
introduces severe limitations to its users. In this paper, we present and
thoroughly analyze DSME-LoRa, a system design of LoRa with IEEE 802.15.4 DSME
as a MAC layer. DSME-LoRa offers the advantage of seamless client-to-client
communication beyond the pure gateway-centric transmission of LoRaWAN. We
evaluate its feasibility via a full-stack implementation on the popular RIOT
operating system, assess its steady-state packet flows in an analytical
stochastic Markov model, and quantify its scalability in massive communication
scenarios using large scale network simulations. Our findings indicate that
DSME-LoRa is indeed a powerful approach that opens LoRa to standard network
layers and outperforms LoRaWAN in many dimensions.
