On fast prototyping LoRaWAN: a cheap and open platform for daily experiments

Abstract

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are gaining momentum within Internet of Things (IoT) circles, thanks to their inherent capabilities to simplify network topologies and increase coverage in low rate low power communications. This manuscript focuses on a specific LPWAN technology, namely Long Range Wireless Area Network (LoRaWAN), which is being widely investigated by the research community worldwide. LoRaWAN offers many noticeable features, including: wide coverage areas, security by design, power consumption and bandwidth optimization, and a high degree of flexibility and reconfigurability. Unfortunately, in spite of these valuable characteristics, LoRaWAN appliances are often closed source and proprietary. To bridge the gap, this manuscript proposes a prototype, which has been designed and set up using open low-cost experimental boards and programming tools, only. Moreover, an experimental campaign has been carried out in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed platform.

Experimenting LoRa‐compliant solutions in Real‐World Scenarios

“…From an architectural point of view, for each prototype, the networks are composed by an end‐node, monitoring the environment and transmitting data to the gateway, and a gateway, in charge of forwarding the received messages to the network server. The first platform is the one presented in and is, from this moment on, referred to as Prototype #1 . The second one, instead, newly introduced herein, is based on the LoPy embedded board and is, from now on, referred to as Prototype #2 .…”

“…From an architectural point of view, for each prototype, the networks are composed by an end-node, monitoring the environment and transmitting data to the gateway, and a gateway, in charge of forwarding the received messages to the network server. The first platform is the one presented in 6 and is, from this moment on, 1 and is, from now on, referred to as Prototype #2. Prototype #1 demonstrated the potential of rapid prototyping standard-compliant solutions to realize small-sized and energy-independent devices for environmental monitoring.…”

“…LPWANs efficiently address connectivity, optimized energy management, security, network complexity, and fast‐paced development . Research efforts are devoted to the design and practical implementation of high‐density IoT networks for distributed and integrated detection, monitoring, and processing systems . Choosing the suitable communication infrastructure for data acquisition may affect scalability, reliability and energy efficiency.…”

“…4,5,7 In the case of environmental monitoring, LPWAN solutions represent some of the most interesting possibilities (Table 1), especially in terms of remote and distributed sensing. 5,6 LoRa is a modulation technique that enables the long-range transfer of information with a low data-rate and operates over the first two layers of the ISO/OSI structure, for example, the physical layer and the Medium Access Control (MAC) one. The physical layer is based on a proprietary Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation.…”

IEEE 802.11ba Wake-Up Radio: Performance Evaluation and Practical Designs

“…However, to extend the lifetime of batteries, substantially increasing transmission power may be practically infeasible, and therefore LPWAN is solely suitable for IoT applications that only require to transmit a small amount of data. For example, long range (LoRa) LPWAN [9], [10] are non-standardized LPWAN systems to offer low data rates from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps. Sigfox operates another type of LPWAN on the Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) bands [11] to support an even lower data rate to transmit a small payload size of 12 bytes within up to 2 seconds.…”