Fault-Tolerant Energy-Efficient LoRaWAN Networking Architecture

Fault tolerance and energy efficiency are two key enablers for a sustainable service infrastructure for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Among the low-power wide-area network technologies, LoRaWAN is a promising candidate to meet the requirements. This paper describes a design and im-plementation of a fault-tolerant energy-efficient LoRaWAN IoT architecture. The architecture design adopts the primary/backup approach to prevent single point of failure at the LoRaWAN gateway, and by design a network server would coordinate with the LoRa end devices to select appropriate spreading factors to achieve higher energy efficiency during normal operation. The proposed architecture has been implemented upon the open source LoRaWAN framework ChirpStack. The implementation is empirically evaluated in a university campus setting, and the experiment results suggest that the proposed networking architecture may tolerate LoRaWAN gateway failure while saving energy spent at each LoRa end device.