A novel single-channel edge computing LoRa gateway for real-time confirmed messaging

Abstract

LoRaWAN has become the technology of choice for increasing Internet of Things applications owing to its long range and low power consumption characteristics. However, in the uplink confirmed messaging cases, the entire retransmission could take several seconds, so it cannot be used in scenarios that require rapid confirmed messaging, such as emergency alerting and real-time controlling applications. Nevertheless, there has been limited work targeting this issue. This study presents a novel LoRaWAN gateway using edge computing to expedite the confirmed messaging process by generating the acknowledgment (ACK) locally, so that the confirmed messaging time can be significantly reduced. Additionally, the resource utilization of the network server can also be decreased due to the use of edge computing. We verified the effectiveness of our solution through extensive simulations and experiments. The confirmed messaging time between the end nodes and the gateway averaged 43 ms for a maximum of 2 retransmissions. With the adoption of edge computing on the gateway, the network server’s central processing unit (CPU), memory, and bandwidth peak utilization decrease from 53.51 to 39.46, 73.88 to 72.11%, and 4422.68 kbps to 3271.27 kbps, respectively. In addition, the network server’s system load decreases from 2.15 to 1.69, while the gateway cost is reduced by almost $$\$$$ $ 38 compared to the benchmark products.