Abstract
LoRa is a long-range and low-power radio technology largely employed in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. It defines the lower physical layer while other protocols, such as LoRaWAN, define the upper layers of the network. A LoRaWAN network assumes a star topology where each of the nodes communicates with multiple gateways which, in turn, forward the collected data to a network server. The main LoRaWAN characteristic is the central role of the gateways; however, in some application scenarios, a much lighter protocol stack, relying only on node capabilities and without the presence of gateways, can be more suitable. In this paper, we present a preliminary study for realizing a LoRa-based mesh network, not relying on LoRaWAN, that implements a peer-to-peer communication between nodes, without the use of gateways, and extends node reachability through multi-hop communication. To validate our investigations, we present a hardware/software prototype based on low-power-consumption devices, and we preliminarily assess the proposed solution.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundThe Internet of Things (IoT) has become an essential and pervasive means in our society
This means that the routing/elaboration time in the intermediate node is almost negligible and that the overall delivery time is dominated by the time needed to send/receive the message through the LoRa transceivers
Five parallel requests per second are instead always handled with a very low efficiency, below 0.4 with a a queue size of at least 5. These results show that the adopted hardware is suitable for applications that require few parallel transmissions, as it happens in most IoT scenarios
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an essential and pervasive means in our society. All of them still partially embrace a LoraWAN or LoRaWAN-like network architecture, and extend it towards supporting a “star-of-meshes” topology This means that gateways still play a central role as concentrators, and that data need to be conveyed through Internet/broadband access, to a remote location before being made accessible to applications. Our proposal is extremely cheap (no LoRaWAN gateway needs to be bought and configured) and effective: each of the end devices acts as a simplified gateway, which can be accessed through its USB serial port by a more powerful device (e.g., a laptop) In this case, the limited computational capacity of the single node can be increased in order to embrace more computational demanding application scenarios.
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