Abstract
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) led to the deployment of many applications that use wireless networks, like smart cities and smart agriculture. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) meet many requirements of IoT, such as energy efficiency, low cost, large coverage area, and large-scale deployment. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) networks are one of the most studied and implemented LPWAN technologies, due to the facility to build private networks with an open standard. Typical LoRaWAN networks are single-hop in a star topology, composed of end-devices that transmit data directly to gateways. Recently, several studies proposed multihop LoRaWAN networks, thus forming wireless mesh networks. This article provides a review of the state-of-the-art multihop proposals for LoRaWAN. In addition, we carried out a comparative analysis and classification, considering technical characteristics, intermediate devices function, and network topologies. This paper also discusses open issues and future directions to realize the full potential of multihop networking. We hope to encourage other researchers to work on improving the performance of LoRaWAN mesh networks, with more theoretical and simulation analysis, as well as practical deployments.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to enable heterogeneous devices to communicate and cooperate to provide smart services in different environments transparently to the user
Information security is an essential requirement for all IoT levels, and the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol was developed to provide a secure connection to all the devices
The proposed solution works with the deployment of intermediate nano-gateways, and the routing mechanism is transparent to end-devices and the network server
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to enable heterogeneous devices to communicate and cooperate to provide smart services in different environments transparently to the user. Typical wireless technologies used for this goal, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, have a range of few meters or tens of meters [4] They can use multihop communication in mesh network topologies to expand the coverage area [5]. The Low. Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) were developed to provide a feasible solution for applications that require a wide area coverage and energy efficiency [6]. Some works propose mechanisms using intermediate nodes as a simple relay using only LoRa physical layer, while others propose routing protocols, forming more complex mesh networks Another important choice in LoRaWAN is which node will be the intermediate node: the end-device or the gateway.
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