SCHC-Based Solution for Roaming in LoRaWAN

Abstract

To take advantage of IPv6 stack in IoT technologies, an efficient header compression scheme is required. Since 2004, many IPv6 header compression schemes have been proposed and some of them have been standardized by the IETF. In [9], Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) mechanism has been designed for Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). SCHC compression is based on a common static context stored in both the IoT device and the network side. This static context defines the compression and decompression rules of the headers. The SCHC framework is compatible with LoRaWAN v1.0 [2] but not with LoRaWAN v1.1 that supports roaming of devices during mobility between different LoRaWAN operators. During roaming, the header values of the protocol stack change and are no longer static. In this paper, we propose a solution based on SCHC to support roaming of devices during mobility between different LoRaWAN operators. We define a server to manage the context between operators. In addition, the LoRaWAN frame route and the communication scheme are updated. A testbed has been setup to show the time differences between current LoRaWAN network and our proposal. The results shows that our proposal improves the communication process and decreases the time delay to handle the transmitted messages “uplink” before the registration.