Research and Design of a Decentralized Edge-Computing-Assisted LoRa Gateway

As a narrowband communication technology, long-range (LoRa) contributes to the long development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The LoRa gateway plays an important role in the IoT transport layer, and security and efficiency are the key issues of the current research. In the centralized working model of IoT systems built by traditional LoRa gateways, all the data generated and reported by end devices are processed and stored in cloud servers, which are susceptible to security issues such as data loss and data falsification. Edge computing (EC), as an innovative approach that brings data processing and storage closer to the endpoints, can create a decentralized security infrastructure for LoRa gateway systems, resulting in an EC-assisted IoT working model. Although this paradigm delivers unique features and an improved quality of service (QoS), installing IoT applications at LoRa gateways with limited computing and memory capabilities presents considerable obstacles. This article proposes the design and implementation of an “EC-assisted LoRa gateway” using edge computing. Our proposed latency-aware algorithm (LAA) can greatly improve the reliability of the network system by using a distributed edge computing network technology that can achieve maintenance operations, such as detection, repair, and replacement of failures of edge nodes in the network. Then, an EC-assisted LoRa gateway prototype was developed on an embedded hardware system. Finally, experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed EC-assisted LoRa gateway. Compared with the conventional LoRa gateway, the proposed edge intelligent LoRa gateway had 41.1% lower bandwidth utilization and handled more end devices, ensuring system availability and IoT network reliability more effectively.