A LoRa-Based Mesh Network for Peer-to-Peer Long-Range Communication

LoRa is a long-range and low-power radio technology largely employed in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. It defines the lower physical layer while other protocols, such as LoRaWAN, define the upper layers of the network. A LoRaWAN network assumes a star topology where each of the nodes communicates with multiple gateways which, in turn, forward the collected data to a network server. The main LoRaWAN characteristic is the central role of the gateways; however, in some application scenarios, a much lighter protocol stack, relying only on node capabilities and without the presence of gateways, can be more suitable. In this paper, we present a preliminary study for realizing a LoRa-based mesh network, not relying on LoRaWAN, that implements a peer-to-peer communication between nodes, without the use of gateways, and extends node reachability through multi-hop communication. To validate our investigations, we present a hardware/software prototype based on low-power-consumption devices, and we preliminarily assess the proposed solution.