Enhanced flexible LoRaWAN node for industrial IoT

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is introducing the IoT approach in the industrial automation world, paving the way to innovative services for improving efficiency, reliability and availability of industrial processes and products. The IIoT takes advantage of the collection of large amount of data by means of (wireless) links connecting smart sensors attached to the system of interest. Low Power Wide Area Networks emerged as a viable solution for implementing private cellular like communications. In this paper, the LoRaWAN technology is addressed, thanks to the wide acceptance it received in both industrial and academic worlds. In particular, an enhanced node is proposed as a building block of IIoT-enabled industrial wireless networks. It offers new features: it behaves as a regular node; it can act as a gateway toward legacy/different (wired) networks; and it can extend LoRaWAN coverage acting as a range extender (i.e. a single hop forwarder). After a brief overview of LoRa and LoRaWAN, the paper deals with the features of the realized node, exploiting commercially available hardware. The experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach. In particular, the range extender capability of transmitting replicas of an incoming messages is tested for different transmission delays.