Advanced remote debugging of LoRa-enabled IoT sensor nodes

This work demonstrates a complete setup of a distributed LoRaWAN-based data-acquisition system where individual LoRa end-devices can be supervised by a remote debugging environment. We present the whole chain of data processing from an embedded Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring sensor in the field up to the data-storage and visualization for human end-users connected over the cloud. In particular, we focus on the development-process of the low-power sensor node itself, which plays a key role in every IoT scenario. The sensor node's hardware is realized with a low-cost resource-constrained microcontroller unit (MCU) which executes the sensor-application as well as the embedded LoRaWAN stack. We demonstrate the possibility of remote incircuit-debugging of the embedded wireless node's firmware during operation in the field. Together with the possibility to analyze the power consumption and the radio-frequency spectrum of the wireless node as well as undesired RF interferer the ability to remotely update and debug the MCU's firmware allows to optimize the sensor node for the specific usage scenario and the place of its final operation.