Abstract
Despite the latest research efforts to foster mobility and roaming in heterogeneous Low Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WANs) networks, handover roaming of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is not a success mainly due to fragmentation and difficulties to establish trust across different network domains as well as the lack of interoperability of different LP-WANs wireless protocols. To cope with this issue, this paper proposes a novel handover roaming mechanism for Low Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol that relies on the trusted 5G network to perform IoT device's authentication and key management, thereby extending the mobility and roaming capabilities of LoRaWAN to global scale. The proposal enables interoperability between 5G network and LoRaWAN, whereby multi Radio Access Technologies IoT (multi-RAT IoT) devices can exploit both technologies interchangeably, thereby fostering novel IoT mobility and roaming use cases for LP-WANs not experimented so far. Two integration approaches for LoRaWAN and 5G have been proposed, either assuming 5G spectrum connectivity with standard 5G authentication or performing 5G authentication over the LoRaWAN network. The solution has been deployed, implemented and validated in a real and integrated 5G-LoRaWAN testbed, showing its feasibility and security viability.
Highlights
It is foreseen that Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios based on wireless massive Machine-Type Communications [1], will scale up to billions of heterogeneous connected devices in the coming years [2]
3GPP cellular networks have improved its support on massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) in the latest 5G releases [5] compared to previous Long-Term Evolution (LTE) versions, including Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) [6] and LTE-M protocols, they still yet lacks of some capabilities supported by
There is a big advantage of delegating the device roaming to 5G operators, which usually have bigger back-end and have an already established trusted federation to perform roaming between infrastructures, and they offer these kind of services to virtual operators
Summary
It is foreseen that Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios based on wireless massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) [1], will scale up to billions of heterogeneous connected devices in the coming years [2]. These solutions are always trying to provide support for deployments among homogeneous technologies, being mainly motivated by industrial-centric interests to make a concrete technologies leading in the IoT sector This situation leaves aside more impacting user-centric approaches based on the enabling of roaming capabilities between heterogeneous IoT networks deployed using different technologies in order to allow to best possible use of technology for the final users making use of multi-interface IoT devices. To address this challenge, this research work has devised, implemented and validated a novel handover roaming capability for LoRaWAN that relies on the 5G architecture to enlarge the LoRaWAN roaming scope and its authentication scheme to global scale.
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