Tackling Contention Through Cooperation: A Distributed Federation in LoRaWAN Space

• Main Authors: Delbruel, Stéphane, Small, Nicolas, Aras, Emekcan, Oostvogels, Jonathan, Hughes, Danny
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 21-12-2017
• Subjects: Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1712.08221

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) play a key role in the IoT marketplace
wherein LoRaWAN is considered a leading solution. Despite the traction of
LoRaWAN, research shows that the current contention management mechanisms of
LoRaWAN do not scale. This paper tackles contention on LoRaWAN by introducing
FLIP, a fully distributed and open architecture for LoRaWAN that fundamentally
rethinks how LoRa gateways should be managed and coordinated. FLIP transforms
LoRa gateways into a federated network that provides inherent support for
roaming while tackling contention using consensus-driven load balancing. FLIP
offers identical security guarantees to LoRaWAN, is compatible with existing
gateway hardware and requires no updates to end-device hardware or firmware.
These features ensure the practicality of FLIP and provide a path to its
adoption. We evaluate the performance of FLIP in a large-scale real-world
deployment and demonstrate that FLIP delivers scalable roaming and improved
contention management in comparison to LoRaWAN. FLIP achieves these benefits
within the resource constraints of conventional LoRa gateways and requires no
server hardware.