A Design and Implementation of Decentralized Edge Intelligent 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 current research. On the one hand, 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. On the other hand, edge computing, 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 edge intelligent IoT working model. Although this paradigm delivers unique features and improved quality of service (QoS), installing IoT applications at LoRa gateways with limited computing and memory capabilities presents considerable obstacles. To address this challenge, an edge intelligent LoRa gateway is designed and implemented in this paper. Firstly, we developed an edge intelligent LoRa gateway prototype on an FPGA-based embedded hardware system. Then, we 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. Finally, many experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed edge-intelligent LoRa gateway. The results indicate that the proposed edge intelligent LoRa gateway is more effective in latency-aware in IoT applications, while greatly ensuring system availability and IoT network reliability.