scholarly journals Enhancing Extensive and Remote LoRa Deployments through MEC-Powered Drone Gateways

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (15) ◽  
pp. 4109
Author(s):  
Jorge Gallego-Madrid ◽  
Alejandro Molina-Zarca ◽  
Ramon Sanchez-Iborra ◽  
Jorge Bernal-Bernabe ◽  
José Santa ◽  
...  

The distribution of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in remote areas and the need for network resilience in such deployments is increasingly important in smart spaces covering scenarios, such as agriculture, forest, coast preservation, and connectivity survival against disasters. Although Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, like LoRa, support high connectivity ranges, communication paths can suffer from obstruction due to orography or buildings, and large areas are still difficult to cover with wired gateways, due to the lack of network or power infrastructure. The proposal presented herein proposes to mount LPWAN gateways in drones in order to generate airborne network segments providing enhanced connectivity to sensor nodes wherever needed. Our LoRa-drone gateways can be used either to collect data and then report them to the back-office directly, or store-carry-and-forward data until a proper communication link with the infrastructure network is available. The proposed architecture relies on Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) capabilities to host a virtualization platform on-board the drone, aiming at providing an intermediate processing layer that runs Virtualized Networking Functions (VNF). This way, both preprocessing or intelligent analytics can be locally performed, saving communications and memory resources. The contribution includes a system architecture that has been successfully validated through experimentation with a real test-bed and comprehensively evaluated through computer simulation. The results show significant communication improvements employing LoRa-drone gateways when compared to traditional fixed LoRa deployments in terms of link availability and covered areas, especially in vast monitored extensions, or at points with difficult access, such as rugged zones.

Author(s):  
Domenico Garlisi ◽  
Alessio Martino ◽  
Jad Zouwayhed ◽  
Reza Pourrahim ◽  
Francesca Cuomo

AbstractThe interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing both as for research and market perspectives. Worldwide, we are witnessing the deployment of several IoT networks for different applications, spanning from home automation to smart cities. The majority of these IoT deployments were quickly set up with the aim of providing connectivity without deeply engineering the infrastructure to optimize the network efficiency and scalability. The interest is now moving towards the analysis of the behavior of such systems in order to characterize and improve their functionality. In these IoT systems, many data related to device and human interactions are stored in databases, as well as IoT information related to the network level (wireless or wired) is gathered by the network operators. In this paper, we provide a systematic approach to process network data gathered from a wide area IoT wireless platform based on LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network). Our study can be used for profiling IoT devices, in order to group them according to their characteristics, as well as detecting network anomalies. Specifically, we use the k-means algorithm to group LoRaWAN packets according to their radio and network behavior. We tested our approach on a real LoRaWAN network where the entire captured traffic is stored in a proprietary database. Quite important is the fact that LoRaWAN captures, via the wireless interface, packets of multiple operators. Indeed our analysis was performed on 997, 183 packets with 2169 devices involved and only a subset of them were known by the considered operator, meaning that an operator cannot control the whole behavior of the system but on the contrary has to observe it. We were able to analyze clusters’ contents, revealing results both in line with the current network behavior and alerts on malfunctioning devices, remarking the reliability of the proposed approach.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556
Author(s):  
Aneta Prijic ◽  
Ljubomir Vracar ◽  
Dusan Vuckovic ◽  
Danijel Dankovic ◽  
Zoran Prijic

This paper highlights some crucial design challenges of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems. The focus is on the cellular based, wireless wide area network systems. Design of M2M terminals, used as wireless sensor nodes, is covered in detail, including the criteria for selecting appropriate core and hard- ware peripherals. Discussion is extended to modeling and design of terminal?s embedded software. Communication using framework and backend application software architectures are explored. Practical examples of the described design principles are demonstrated.


2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Njabulo Sakhile Mtetwa ◽  
Paul Tarwireyi ◽  
Cecilia Nombuso Sibeko ◽  
Adnan Abu-Mahfouz ◽  
Matthew Adigun

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way consumers, businesses, and governments interact with the physical and cyber worlds. More often than not, IoT devices are designed for specific functional requirements or use cases without paying too much attention to security. Consequently, attackers usually compromise IoT devices with lax security to retrieve sensitive information such as encryption keys, user passwords, and sensitive URLs. Moreover, expanding IoT use cases and the exponential growth in connected smart devices significantly widen the attack surface. Despite efforts to deal with security problems, the security of IoT devices and the privacy of the data they collect and process are still areas of concern in research. Whenever vulnerabilities are discovered, device manufacturers are expected to release patches or new firmware to fix the vulnerabilities. There is a need to prioritize firmware attacks, because they enable the most high-impact threats that go beyond what is possible with traditional attacks. In IoT, delivering and deploying new firmware securely to affected devices remains a challenge. This study aims to develop a security model that employs Blockchain and the InterPlanentary File System (IPFS) to secure firmware transmission over a low data rate, constrained Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). The proposed security model ensures integrity, confidentiality, availability, and authentication and focuses on resource-constrained low-powered devices. To demonstrate the utility and applicability of the proposed model, a proof of concept was implemented and evaluated using low-powered devices. The experimental results show that the proposed model is feasible for constrained and low-powered LoRaWAN devices.


Author(s):  
Olof Magnusson ◽  
Rikard Teodorsson ◽  
Joakim Wennerberg ◽  
Stig Arne Knoph

LoRaWAN (long-range wide-area network) is an emerging technology for the connection of internet of things (IoT) devices to the internet and can as such be an important part of decision support systems. In this technology, IoT devices are connected to the internet through gateways by using long-range radio signals. However, because LoRaWAN is an open network, anyone has the ability to connect an end device or set up a gateway. Thus, it is important that gateways are designed in such a way that their ability to be used maliciously is limited. This chapter covers relevant attacks against gateways and potential countermeasures against them. A number of different attacks were found in literature, including radio jamming, eavesdropping, replay attacks, and attacks against the implementation of what is called beacons in LoRaWAN. Countermeasures against these attacks are discussed, and a suggestion to improve the security of LoRaWAN is also included.


Author(s):  
Rashid A. Saeed ◽  
Mohammad Hasan ◽  
Rania A. Mokhtar

The communication link of femtocell may be one of Wide Area Network (WAN) technologies, such as, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL). Femtocell used a public network to establish connectivity between femtocell and core network elements where there are a set of challenges to the operators. However, femtocells use IP Network as a backhaul architecture instead of conventional cellular network infrastructure, so that Femtocells and WiFi infrastructure networks can come to a compromise as they have a lot of common iterative and inter-related technologies and activities. This raises the question as to whether femtocell technology will substitute the existing WiFi technology. By carefully analyzing the similarities and differences between the two technologies one can find this answer. This chapter provides a technical comparison between Femtocells and WiFi in terms of architecture, operation, and standards.


Author(s):  
Aizat Faiz Ramli ◽  
Muhammad Ikram Shabry ◽  
Mohd Azlan Abu ◽  
Hafiz Basarudin

LoRaWAN is one of the leading Low power wide area network (LPWAN) LPWAN technologies that compete for the formation of big scale Internet of Things (IoT). It uses LoRa protocol to achieve long range, low bit rate and low power communication. Large scale LoRaWAN based IoT deployments can consist of battery powered sensor nodes. Therefore, the energy consumption and efficiency of these nodes are crucial factors that can influence the lifetime of the network. However, there is no coherent experimental based research which identifies the factors that influence the LoRa energy efficiency at various nodes density. In this paper, results on measuring the packet delivery ratio, packet loss, data rate and energy consumption ratio ECR to gauge the energy efficiency of LoRa devices at various nodes density are presented. It is shown that the ECR of LoRa is inversely proportional to the nodes density and that the ECR of the network is smaller at higher traffic indicating better network energy efficiency. It is also demonstrated that at high node density, spreading factor SF of 7 and 9 can improve the energy efficiency of the network by 5 and 3 times, respectively, compare to SF 11.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (15) ◽  
pp. 3374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fowzia Akhter ◽  
Sam Khadivizand ◽  
Hasin Reza Siddiquei ◽  
Md Eshrat E. Alahi ◽  
Subhas Mukhopadhyay

An Internet of Things (IoT) enabled intelligent sensor node has been designed and developed for smart city applications. The fabricated sensor nodes count the number of pedestrians, their direction of travel along with some ambient parameters. The Field of View (FoV) of Fresnel lens of commercially available passive infrared (PIR) sensors has been specially tuned to monitor the movements of only humans and no other domestic animals such as dogs, cats etc. The ambient parameters include temperature, humidity, pressure, Carbon di Oxide (CO2) and total volatile organic component (TVOC). The monitored data are uploaded to the Internet server through the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) communication system. An intelligent algorithm has been developed to achieve an accuracy of 95% for the pedestrian count. There are a total of 74 sensor nodes that have been installed around Macquarie University and continued working for the last six months.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Johnston ◽  
Philip J. Basford ◽  
Florentin M. J. Bulot ◽  
Mihaela Apetroaie-Cristea ◽  
Natasha H. C. Easton ◽  
...  

Air Quality (AQ) is a very topical issue for many cities and has a direct impact on citizen health. The AQ of a large UK city is being investigated using low-cost Particulate Matter (PM) sensors, and the results obtained by these sensors have been compared with government operated AQ stations. In the first pilot deployment, six AQ Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been designed and built, each with four different low-cost PM sensors, and they have been deployed at two locations within the city. These devices are equipped with LoRaWAN wireless network transceivers to test city scale Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) coverage. The study concludes that (i) the physical device developed can operate at a city scale; (ii) some low-cost PM sensors are viable for monitoring AQ and for detecting PM trends; (iii) LoRaWAN is suitable for city scale sensor coverage where connectivity is an issue. Based on the findings from this first pilot project, a larger LoRaWAN enabled AQ sensor network is being deployed across the city of Southampton in the UK.


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