"With the expansion of the Internet of Thing (IoT), Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) wireless systems have recently emerged. LPWA solutions such as SigFox and Lora have provided an alternative to current generations of cellular systems (2G, 3G and 4G). LPWA solutions are now offering low power and long range communications for smart cities, smart metering, home automation, wearable electronics, logistics…Nevertheless, the scalability of such solutions, as well as their relation to short-range technologies in terms of capacity, energy-efficiency, performance, is however not fully understood yet.The first step of this internship will focus on the performance and the limitation of long-range communication in terms of reliability, scalability, medium utilization, energy consumption, mobility support, flexibility... For example the student will study the limitation of long-range communication (with one or several access points) to manage Hotspot area or high density networks. The selected LPWA solution will be implemented and evaluated using CEA WSNet simulator, a complete and modular simulation environment for large scale and mobile wireless networks. This simulator is written in C and includes node modeling (e.g. mobility, battery, from MAC to application layers) and realistic physical modeling (e.g. propagation, physical layer abstraction). The simulated performance results will serve as a reference performance benchmark for LPWA.The second step will be to propose and evaluate some enhancements. Envisaged enhancements include extending the star LPWA network topology to mesh. An interesting approach could consider a solution based on the recently standardized IEEE 802.15.4e MAC layer.This study could serve as a preliminary introduction work for a more in-depth study leading to a PhD thesis. "