LoRaWAN at the Edge

"The LoRaWAN® specification is a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated ‘things’ to the internet in regional, national or global networks, and targets key Internet of Things (IoT) requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services."

Source: https://lora-alliance.org/about-lorawan/

See LoRaWAN Network Fundamentals for background information on LoRaWAN itself.

Objective

Create a LoRaWAN device driver at the edge to communicate with end/leaf devices for control and telemetry data. It targets key Internet of Things (IoT) requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services. This allows communication with other device protocols at the edge.

Implementation

  • Use the open source Chirpstack (v4) LoRa Server Stack on the Edge Cluster as a private LoRa network.
  • Use a LoRaWAN device driver to link the LoRa Server Stack to the Edge Compute Platform
  • Use a LoRaWAN concentrator (LoRa gateway) on the Edge Cluster to connect to the LoRa Server Stack
  • Pre-configure a default setup
Note: This setup is flexible. For example, any existing LoRa gateway (hardware) can be used to connect to our private LoRa network (Server Stack).

Required at the Edge

The Core Services of the Edge Compute Platform need to have been installed.

The following services need to be installed on the edge in order to handle LoRaWAN communication:
  • ecp-lorawan-stack-gateway-bridge
  • ecp-lorawan-stack-chirpstack
  • ase-lora-gateway
  • ase-lorawan-driver

The LoRa Gateway is not required to run on the same Edge Node, in fact it can be any (commercially available) LoRa Gateway that connects to the LoRaWAN Gateway Bridge (ecp-lorawan-stack-gateway-bridge). However, the default setup works with a LoRa Gateway on the same node.

The LoRa Application Server, Network Server, and Join Server (see LoRaWAN Network Fundamentals ) are combined into the ecp-lorawan-stack-chirpstack service.

These services can be deployed by adding the "App - ECP LoRaWAN Stack", "App - ECP LoRa Gateway" and "App - ECP LoRaWAN Driver" applications from the Marketplace to your own space (see Marketplace).
Note: The "App - ECP LoRaWAN Stack" is based on Chirpstack v4 and requires version "chart-0.0.8" or higher of the "App - ECP LoRa Gateway" and version "chart-0.0.40" or higher of the "App - ECP LoRaWAN Driver". Older versions of these two apps are only compatible with the deprecated "App - ECP LoRa Server Stack" which is based on Chirpstack v3.
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