Seamless remote roaming activation in LoRaWAN via an API-driven gateway bridge service

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, notably in smart cities, smart metering, environmental monitoring, and smart agriculture, highlights the critical need for seamless and efficient device roaming within Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) infrastructures. Although LoRaWAN shows great potential, its deployment faces significant challenges, especially under the constraints of the version 1.0 specifications, to enable efficient device mobility. This study introduces a comprehensive approach to enhance LoRaWAN-supported mobility, using three key advancements: the decoupling of Gateways (GWs) from the core network infrastructures to facilitate flexible deployments, the adoption of an adaptive GW-to-network connection protocol responsive to real-time traffic demands, and the enhancement of GW interoperability to provide dynamic and efficient network configurations. A notable innovation of this research is developing a mechanism that enables packet forwarding through an unidentified GW, eliminating the need for pre-established network agreements. The empirical evaluations of the article detail the effectiveness of the architecture in IoT applications, showcasing significant improvements in LoRaWAN’s roaming capabilities and reporting average latencies of up to 0.39 s in experimental tests. Extensive simulations with up to 100 roaming devices and 100 stationary devices further confirmed scalability, keeping the average roaming-to-stationary latency gap below 0.16 s and the worst-case end-to-end delay below 1.2 s even in highly congested scenarios. This contribution addresses pivotal challenges within the current LoRaWAN networks and sets the background for future advancements in IoT network technologies.