Supporting TCP-Based Remote Managements of LoRa/LoRaWAN Devices

Abstract

LoRa/LoRaWAN is an LPWAN (Low-Power Wide Area Network) wireless technology proposed for IoT applications. It has the advantages of long-range transmission (more than 10 Km in open space) and low-power consumption, and has been used in many IoT applications such as smart metering and intelligent agriculture. The maximum payload size of a LoRaWAN packet is very short and is only 50 bytes. Thus, currently TCP/IP packets cannot be transmitted over a LoRaWAN network and a network manager cannot use common commands such as telnet or ssh to remotely log into a LoRaWAN device to troubleshoot it through its LoRaWAN network. Instead, the network manager needs to go to the remote site in person to do the troubleshooting work, which incurs a great amount of time, efforts, and costs. In this paper, we design and implement a system to transmit TCP/IP packets over a LoRaWAN network. Across the Internet, a network manager can use our system to remotely troubleshoot a LoRaWAN device via its LoRaWAN network.