LoRaWAN Demonstration

A LoRaWAN-based Internet of Things (IoT) demonstration is created at the Advanced Networks Research Group (ANRG), University of Liverpool.

Overview

LoRa/LoRoWAN is one of the most dominant low power wide area networks (LPWAN) techniques. LoRa defines the physical layer modulation and is a proprietary technique patented by Semtech. LoRaWAN is the upper layer protocol maintained by LoRa Alliance.

A light sensing and control IoT system is created as a case study. The LoRa end device is consisted of FiPy (with LoRa function) and Pysense (expansion board) with light sensors. A LoRa end device A will sense the light and transmit it to the application server. When the luminous intensity is smaller than a threshold, it will send a control signal to the LoRa end device B and turn its LED to green, emulating a control signal to a switch.

Key Features

• Regular uplink transmissions
• Manual downlink transmissions (confirmed or unconfirmed)
• Automatic downlink transmissions (determined by the threshold)

Setup

Hardware

• End device: FiPy + Pysense (light sensors embedded)
• Gateway: Raspberry Pi + RAK831, an instruction can be found at https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/rak831/

Software

• TTN to host the gateway and applications
• Python SDK
• Micropython for the FiPy

Demo Video

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Mr Wenpeng Fan for his hard work on completing this excellent demo.