Dirk Kutscher

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Rethinking LoRa for the IoT: An Information-centric Approach

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We just published our IEEE Communications Magazine article on Rethinking LoRa for the IoT with an Open Access license.

LoraWAN and the Internet

Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects numerous sensors and actuators either locally or across the global Internet. From an application perspective, IoT systems are inherently data-oriented, their purpose is often to provide access to named sensor data and control interfaces. From a device and communication perspective, things in the IoT are resource-constrained devices that are commonly powered by a small battery and communicate wirelessly.

LoRaWAN systems today integrate the LoRa physical layer with the LoRaWAN MAC layer and corresponding infrastructure support. Among the IoT radio technologies, LoRa is a versatile and popular candidate since it provides a physical layer that allows for data transmission over multiple kilometers with minimal energy consumption. At the same time, the high LoRa receiver sensitivity enables packet reception in noisy environments, which makes it attractive for industrial deployments. On the downside, LoRa achieves only low data rates requiring long on-air times, and significantly higher latencies compared to radios that are typically used for Internet access.

LoraWAN MAC Layer

The LoRaWAN MAC layer and network architecture that is often used in LoRa deployments, thus provide a vertically integrated sensor data delivery service on top of the LoRa PHY that implements media access and end-to-end network connectivity. Unfortunately, LoRaWAN cannot utilize the LoRa PHY to its best potential with respect to throughput and robustness and is mostly used for upstream-only communication. It is not intended to directly interconnect with the Internet, but relies on a bespoke middlebox architecture consisting of gateways and network servers. Overall LoRaWAN has the following main problems, as depicted in the figure below.

  1. Centralization around a network server prevents data sharing between users, across distributed applications, and requires permanent infrastructure backhaul of the wireless access network.
  2. Uplink-oriented and uncoordinated communication leads to wireless interference. Downlink traffic is rarely available in practice and suffers from scalability issues.

Data-centric Delay-tolerant End-to-End Communication over the Internet

This paper presents an overview about recent advancements to enable data-centric, long-range IoT communication based on LoRa. The proposed network system aims for delay-tolerant, bi-directional communication in the presence of vastly longer latencies and lower bandwidth compared to regular Internet systems – without relying on vertically integrated middlebox-based architectures. The resulting system resolves current LoRaWAN performance issues using two main building blocks: a new network layer based on Information-centric Networking (ICN) and a new MAC layer.

Originally designed for non-constrained wired networks to abandon the end-to-end paradigm and access data only by names instead of IP endpoints, ICN migrated to the constrained wireless IoT over the past years. ICN still lacks a lower layer definition but provides mechanisms that are beneficial for the challenging LoRa domain: Decoupling of content from endpoints separates data access from physical infrastructure. Inherent content caching and replication potentially reduce link load, thus, wireless interference, and it preserves battery resources. The ICN-LoRa system presented in this paper bases its design on IEEE 802.15.4 DSME which was originally designed for low-power personal area networks. This MAC handles media access reliably using time- and frequency multiplexing, and enables reliable bi-directional communication.

Synergizing the advantages of LoRa, DSME, and ICN enables delay-tolerant, bi-directional LoRa communication, wich enhances many existing IoT applications. Wide area data retrieval and control as for solar power stations or smart street lighting systems are facilitated by the new MAC and its ICN integration. High voltage overhead line monitoring connecting voltage sensors and transformers relies on high data reliability, even under intermittent connectivity or loss. ICN achieves this, employing content caching and replication. Traveling container monitoring (RFC 7744) is challenging due to mobility and interference from metallic surfaces, where LoRa surpasses other radio systems. Decoupling content from its location for mobile containers and an adaptation to long producer delays are naturally contributed by LoRa-ICN.

Results

In our paper, we provide the essential technical background and challenges to design a LoRa-ICN system. We identify the key performance potentials of five protocol variants based on an implementation in RIOT OS and experiments on off-the-shelf IoT devices.

LoRa is an attractive radio technology for the IoT, providing a long wireless transmission range for battery-driven devices. Its versatility is hindered, though, by common deployments with LoRaWAN. We re-visited LoRa in the IoT to provide a serverless, data-oriented communication service. We presented the design of a new media access and network layer that leverages 802.15.4 DSME and Information-centric Networking to allow for reliable LoRa transmissions. To scale to a global Internet (of Things), LoRa-ICN facilitates ubiquitous connectivity of constrained nodes and robust bi-directional communication in the presence of power-saving regimes and high loss rates.

We showed that vastly higher latencies in low-power wireless domains can be addressed by extending the default ICN node behavior at the network edge. Two protocol extensions enable ICN-style data transport between resource-constrained LoRa nodes and a domain-agnostic application on the ICN Internet. The core idea is not limited to LoRa but caters to various delay-prone scenarios. Our experiments based on common IoT hardware and software showed significant performance improvements and further optimization potential compared to Vanilla ICN.

The new LoRa-ICN system paves the way for more versatile LoRa deployments in the IoT that serve additional use cases, mixed sensor-actor topologies, or firmware updates utilizing beacon overloading.

References

This article

  • P. Kietzmann, J. Alamos, D. Kutscher, T. C. Schmidt and M. Wählisch, Rethinking LoRa for the IoT: An Information-centric Approach in IEEE Communications Magazine, doi: 10.1109/MCOM.001.2300379.

Reflexive forwarding

The ICN communication mechanisms this work is based on.

In-depth publications this work is based on

  • Peter Kietzmann, José Alamos, Dirk Kutscher, Thomas C. Schmidt, and Matthias Wählisch. 2022. Delay-tolerant ICN and its application to LoRa. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3558081
  • P. Kietzmann, J. Alamos, D. Kutscher, T. C. Schmidt and M. Wählisch, Long-Range ICN for the IoT: Exploring a LoRa System Design, 2022 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking), Catania, Italy, 2022, pp. 1-9, doi: 10.23919/IFIPNetworking55013.2022.9829792. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9829792
  • José Álamos, Peter Kietzmann, Thomas C. Schmidt, and Matthias Wählisch. 2022. DSME-LoRa: Seamless Long-range Communication between Arbitrary Nodes in the Constrained IoT. ACM Trans. Sen. Netw. 18, 4, Article 69 (November 2022), 43 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3552432

Written by dkutscher

November 29th, 2023 at 6:08 am

Posted in ICN,Publications

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A new Delay Tolerant Networking Architecture for LoRa

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Abstract

Connecting low-power long-range wireless networks, such as LoRa, to the Internet imposes significant challenges because of the vastly longer round-trip-times (RTTs) in these constrained networks. In our newly published paper on "Delay-Tolerant ICN and Its Application to LoRa" at ACM ICN-2022, we present an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) protocol framework that enables robust and efficient delay-tolerant communication to edge networks, including but not limited to LoRa. Our approach provides ICN-idiomatic communication between networks with vastly different RTTs for different use cases. We applied this framework to LoRa, enabling end-to-end consumer-to-LoRa-producer interaction over an ICN-Internet and asynchronous ("push") data production in the LoRa edge. Instead of using LoRaWAN, we implemented an IEEE 802.15.4e DSME MAC layer on top of the LoRa PHY layer and ICN protocol mechanisms in the RIOT operating system. For our experiments, we connected constrained LoRa nodes and gateways on IoT hardware platforms to a regular, emulated ICN network and performed a series of measurements that demonstrate robustness and efficiency improvements compared to standard ICN.

Challenging Bi-Directional LoRa Communication

LoRaWAN provides a vertically integrated network architecture for connecting LoRa networks and its constrained devices to the Internet that is designed to offload power-constrained gateways relay communication between the wireless link and network servers (often co-located with additional application server infrastructure) that manage the intricate energy-conservation regime of connected LoRa devices.

The energy conservation objectives lead to a MAC layer design that incurs dramatically higher latency and round trip times (RTTs) of several seconds, compared to what connection-oriented Internet transport protocols are typically designed to support. As a result, LoRaWAN supports message-oriented transport through gateways and dedicated network servers only, without a notion of end-to-end communication from the Internet to LoRa nodes. While it is theoretically possible to run bidirectional IP-based communication on top of LoRaWAN, the resulting systems inherit latency challenges of LoRaWAN for bi-directional communication that would impact transport layer performance and applicability.

Delay-Tolerant Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has demonstrated benefits for improving data availability and communication performance in constrained IoT networks.

In a newly published paper on "Delay-Tolerant ICN and Its Application to LoRa" at ACM ICN-2022, Peter Kietzmann, José Alamos, Thomas Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch and myself argue that ICN is also a suitable network layer for connecting such challenged edge networks to a more regular Internet, by leveraging hop-by-hop transport functions, ICN caching and minimal application-agnostic extensions.

In earlier work, we have described a design of an improved, IEEE 802.15.4e DSME-based MAC layer for LoRa that supports packet-based communication, specifically ICN-style Interest/Data communication. Yet, RTTs can still be on the order of seconds due to the underlying power saving regime. Leveraging their work, we take an ICN-enabled LoRa subnet as a basis which is attached via an ICN forwarder on a gateway device. We developed a delay-tolerant ICN communication framework that allows connecting these LoRa sub-networks to a "regular" ICN Internet, with the following design goals:

  1. supporting IoT sensor data transmission;
  2. supporting arbitrary orders of delays, without specific assumptions of typical RTTs on other nodes on the ICN Internet;
  3. not requiring application awareness on gateway nodes;
  4. utilizing ICN-idiomatic communication to benefit from ICN principles such as accessing named data, Interest/Data semantics, caches, flow balance, etc.

We have developed interactions for IoT communication use cases that leverage bespoke (but application-agnostic) capabilities on gateway-based forwarders and the Reflexive Forwarding extensions for ICN that Dave Oran and I developed for Remote Method Invocation, RESTful communication, and IoT push data scenarios.

Our LoRa systems features two interaction patterns. First, IoT sensor data retrieval from an Internet-based consumer using Interest/Data interactions; and second, asynchronously "pushing'' data from an IoT sensor to an Internet-based consumer with pub/sub semantics.

Results

The contributions of out work are the following:

  1. The design of delay-tolerant ICN-interactions and node behavior for this constrained environment.
  2. A complete implementation of the DSME MAC layer for LoRa and our ICN protocol extensions on RIOT, serving common LoRa sensors and RIOT-based gateways.
  3. An experiment-based evaluation of the interactions on constrained IoT hardware, connected to an emulated ICN-Internet, and a comparison with vanilla ICN approaches.

In conjunction with the OS-level implementation of ICN (and extensions), DSME, and LoRa, our two protocol mechanisms for Internet consumer-initiated and LoRa producer-initiated communication exhibit high reliability and targeted completion time (compared to Vanilla ICN) when applied to the delay-prone regime.

Despite an additional round trip, our evaluations in the paper exhibit low overhead of these approaches by overcoming redundant polling. We leveraged recently proposed gateway behavior (such as RICE) and ICN protocol extensions (reflexive forwarding), the latter of which serves many other use cases beyond phoning home and could be considered a useful standard ICN feature.

References

Written by dkutscher

September 15th, 2022 at 11:09 am

Posted in Publications

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Information-Centric Long-Range Networking: Re-Imagining LoRaWAN

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LoRaWAN is a popular low-power long-range communication system for IoT that is suitable for single-site deployments as well as for larger networks. It consists of LoRa, a PHY layer that allows for radio communication between 2 and 14 km, and higher-layer protocols mainly to upload IoT data to a serverbased infrastructure. These characteristics make LoRaWAN a promising option for many urban and rural IoT scenarios.

The LoRaWAN network design incurs, however, four notable shortcomings:

  1. LoRaWAN is heavily optimized towards retrieving data from constrained Nodes. Sending data to Nodes is expensive and involves significant latencies. Many networks such as the popular community The Things Network (TTN) thus deprecate sending data to Nodes above a very low message rate, making LoRaWAN unsuitable for most control scenarios.
  2. LoRaWAN has not been designed with the objective to provide a platform for Internet protocols. It is possible to use IP and adaptation layers on top of LoRaWAN, albeit very inefficiently.
  3. The whole LoRaWAN system is a vertically integrated stack that leads to inflexible system designs and inefficiencies. For example, all communication is channeled through LoRaWAN Gateways as well as Application- and Network Servers that interconnect with applications.
  4. The centralization and lock-in into vertical protocol stacks challenge data sharing (between users) and the creation of distributed applications (across LoRa island and the Internet).

A new LoraWAN architecture based on DSME and ICN

In our IFIP Networking 2022 paper "Long-Range ICN for the IoT: Exploring a LoRa System Design", Peter Kietzmann, José Alamos, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch, and myself aim for a better integration of the LoRa-based Internet of Things into the remaining Internet. We base our system design on the following four requirements:

  1. enabling LoRa networks and Nodes in these networks to communicate directly with hosts on the Internet;
  2. empowering LoRa Gateways to act as routers, without the need to employ Network Servers and to tunnel all traffic to or from them;
  3. enabling secure data sharing and wireless Node control; and
  4. maintaining the important power conservation and robustness properties of current LoRaWAN systems.

To achieve these goals without abandoning the benefits of the LoRA PHY (i.e., a robust, energy-efficient long-range communication channel) we developed both a complete redesign of the MAC layer and a data-oriented network layer on top. Our work leverages two key building blocks.

  1. the Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-Channel Extension (DSME) extension to IEEE 802.15.4e, a flexible MAC layer that consists of contention-access and contention-free periods, and,
  2. the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) protocol NDN, which provides secure access to named data in networks.

LoRa and ICN

Prior work showed that ICN provides clear benefits over traditional IP and CoAP or MQTT stacks in the IoT. Our research showed that ICN is also well-suited for LoRa networks because its hop-wise data replication increases robustness and flexibility while reducing retransmission load. This enhances adaptivity and decreases communication overhead, whereas link capacity is scarce with LoRa. Named and authenticated data access enables location-independence since applications can access named data directly, without resorting to lower-layer addresses. Furthermore, built-in caches in ICN facilitate more efficient LoRa networks. Requests that are satisfied by an in-network cache

  1. reduce link utilization, to improve on air time and wireless interference;
  2. facilitate Node sleep; and
  3. reduce long round trips introduced by slow transmissions.

Results

In our paper, we describe

  1. the design of ICN over LoRa, including a suitable DSME configuration and options for mapping ICN messages to DSME;
  2. a complete simulation environment in OMNeT++ that combines ccnSim as an ICN stack, openDSME as a MAC layer, and FLoRa to simulate LoRa-type devices—and a demonstration of our adaptation layers in that system.
  3. Preferred mappings and additional Node requirements for implementing relevant ICN interaction patterns, based on our simulation results.

Code and documentation is available at https://github.com/inetrg/IFIP-Networking-LoRa-ICN-2022, and the whole system is currently being implemented for the RIOT Operating System.

References

Written by dkutscher

May 17th, 2022 at 3:01 pm

Posted in Publications

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Re-Thinking LoRaWAN

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Low-power, long-range radio systems such as LoRaWAN represent one of the few remaining networked system domains that still feature a complete vertical stack with special link- and network layer designs independent of IP. Similar to local IoT systems for low-power networks (LoWPANs), the main service of these systems is to make data available at minimal energy consumption, but over longer distances. LoRaWAN (the system that comprises the LoRa PHY and MAC) supports bi-directional communication, if the IoT device has the energy budget. Application developers interface with the system using a centralized server that terminates the LoRaWAN protocol and makes data available on the Internet.

While LoRaWAN applications are typically providing access to named data, the existing LoRaWAN stack does not support this way of communicating. LoRaWAN is device-centric and is generally designed as a device-to-server messaging system – with centralized servers that serve as rendezvous point for accessing sensor data. The current design imposes rigid constraints and does not facilitate accessing named data natively, which results in many point solutions and dependencies on central server instances.

In our demo paper & presentation at ACM ICN-2020, we are therefore describing how Information-Centric Networking could provide a more natural communication style for LoRa applications and how ICN could help to conceive LoRa networks in a more distributed fashion compared to todays mainstream LoRaWAN deployments. For LoWPANs (e.g., 802.15.4 networks), ICN has already demonstrated to be an attractive and viable alternative to legacy integrated special purpose stacks – we believe that
LoRa communication provides similar opportunities.

Watch my Peter Kietzmann's talk about it here:

Written by dkutscher

October 6th, 2020 at 10:39 pm

Posted in Events,IRTF,Projects,Talks

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