Tackling Contention Through Cooperation: A Distributed Federation in LoRaWAN Space

Abstract: Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) play a key role in the IoT marketplace wherein LoRaWAN is considered a leading solution. Despite the traction of LoRaWAN, research shows that the current contention management mechanisms of LoRaWAN do not scale. This paper tackles contention on LoRaWAN by introducing FLIP, a fully distributed and open architecture for LoRaWAN that fundamentally rethinks how LoRa gateways should be managed and coordinated. FLIP transforms LoRa gateways into a federated network that provides inherent support for roaming while tackling contention using consensus-driven load balancing. FLIP offers identical security guarantees to LoRaWAN, is compatible with existing gateway hardware and requires no updates to end-device hardware or firmware. These features ensure the practicality of FLIP and provide a path to its adoption. We evaluate the performance of FLIP in a large-scale real-world deployment and demonstrate that FLIP delivers scalable roaming and improved contention management in comparison to LoRaWAN. FLIP achieves these benefits within the resource constraints of conventional LoRa gateways and requires no server hardware.