GPS-free geolocation using LoRa in low-power WANs

Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing over the last few years in multiple applications and due to a growing need for geolocation and tracking capabilities, an innovative opportunity arises. Whereas geolocation is traditionally based on GPS units this paper reports on a design and implementation of a LoRaWAN tracking system which is capable exploiting transmitted packages to calculate the current position without the use of GPS or GSM. This is done using the low power technology LoRa where the geolocation is calculated applying a multilateration algorithm on the gateways timestamps from received packages. The whole system consisted of an end-node, four gateways, a server and a java application to store the obtained data in a MySQL database.