Integrated Satellite-terrestrial networks for IoT: LoRaWAN as a Flying Gateway

When the Internet of Things (IoT) was introduced, it causes an immense change in human life. Recently, different IoT emerging use cases, which will involve an even higher number of connected devices aimed at collecting and sending data with different purposes and over different application scenarios, such as smart city, smart factory, and smart agriculture. In some cases, the terrestrial infrastructure is not enough to guarantee the typical performance indicators due to its design and intrinsic limitations. Coverage is an example, where the terrestrial infrastructure is not able to cover certain areas such as remote and rural areas. Flying technologies, such as communication satellites and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), can contribute to overcome the limitations of the terrestrial infrastructure, offering wider coverage, higher resilience and availability, and improving user\u2019s Quality of Experience (QoE). IoT can benefit from the UAVs and satellite integration in many ways, also beyond the coverage extension and the increase of the available bandwidth that these objects can offer. This thesis proposes the integration of both IoT and UAVs to guarantee the increased coverage in hard to reach and out of coverage areas. Its core focus addresses the development of the IoT flying gateway and data mule and testing both approaches to show their feasibility. The first approach for the integration of IoT and UAV results in the implementing of LoRa flying gateway with the aim of increasing the IoT communication protocols\u2019 coverage area to reach remote and rural areas. This flying gateway examines the feasibility for extending the coverage in a remote area and transmitting the data to the IoT cloud in real-time. Moreover, it considers the presence of a satellite between the gateway and the final destination for areas with no Internet connectivity and communication means such as WiFi, Ethernet, 4G, or LTE. The experimental results have shown that deploying a LoRa gateway on board a flying drone is an ideal option for the extension of the IoT network coverage in rural and remote areas. The second approach for the integration of the aforementioned technologies is the deployment of IoT data mule concept for LoRa networks. The difference here is the storage of the data on board of the gateway and not transmitting the data to the IoT cloud in real time. The aim of this approach is to receive the data from the LoRa sensors installed in a remote area, store them in the gateway up until this flying gateway is connected to the Internet. The experimental results have shown the feasibility of our flying data mule in terms of signal quality, data delivery, power consumption and gateway status. The third approach considers the security aspect in LoRa networks. The possible physical attacks that can be performed on any LoRa device can be performed once its location is revealed. Position estimation was carried out using one of the LoRa signal features: RSSI. The values of RSSI are fed to the Trilateration localization algorithm to estimate the device\u2019s position. Different outdoor tests were done with and without the drone, and the results have shown that RSSI is a low cost option for position estimation that can result in a slight error due to different environmental conditions that affect the signal quality. In conclusion, by adopting both IoT technology and UAV, this thesis advances the development of flying LoRa gateway and LoRa data mule for the aim of increasing the coverage of LoRa networks to reach rural and remote areas. Moreover, this research could be considered as the first step towards the development of high quality and performance LoRa flying gateway to be tested and used in massive LoRa IoT networks in rural and remote areas

IoT and UAV Integration in 5G Hybrid Terrestrial-Satellite Networks

The Fifth Generation of Mobile Communications (5G) will lead to the growth of use cases demanding higher capacity and a enhanced data rate, a lower latency, and a more flexible and scalable network able to offer better user Quality of Experience (QoE). The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of these use cases. It has been spreading in the recent past few years, and it covers a wider range of possible application scenarios, such as smart city, smart factory, and smart agriculture, among many others. However, the limitations of the terrestrial network hinder the deployment of IoT devices and services. Besides, the existence of a plethora of different solutions (short vs. long range, commercialized vs. standardized, etc.), each of them based on different communication protocols and, in some cases, on different access infrastructures, makes the integration among them and with the upcoming 5G infrastructure more difficult. This paper discusses the huge set of IoT solutions available or still under standardization that will need to be integrated in the 5G framework. UAVs and satellites will be proposed as possible solutions to ease this integration, overcoming the limitations of the terrestrial infrastructure, such as the limited covered areas and the densification of the number of IoT devices per square kilometer

Towards Increasing the LoRa Network Coverage: A Flying Gateway

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been emerging since the last two decades. It is difficult to ignore its presence as it is almost related to every aspects of our daily life, starting from smart phones to wearable medical devices and smart vehicles. A plethora of communication solutions have been developed to meet the two main features of IoT: low power consumption and long range transmissions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) also are witnessing an increasing interest in a lot of different scenarios and with different roles, including the integration with IoT. Extending the coverage of IoT to rural and remote areas by using UAVs and satellite communications is envisioned as an improvement of the IoT technology towards the upcoming 5G network. This paper presents an approach integrating the aforementioned technologies to develop a flying LoRa gateway, whose aim is to extend the coverage of LoRa networks on-demand in the required locations and for the required time

Comparison between UAV IoT solutions with and without satellite backhaul link

New applications related to the Internet of Things (IoT) concept are constantly growing and wide-spreading. Some of these applications are typically referring to urban environ- ments, such as the applications within Smart City and Smart Home scenarios, while others are mostly referring to rural environments, such as the applications within Smart Agriculture and Smart Grid scenarios. Focusing on rural environments, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can help collect data from multiple IoT devices, such as sensors, which could be spread in a wide area and difficult to physically reach. However, forward these data to storage centers typically deployed on the Cloud or to the Edge of the network closer to the users may be a challenge due to the lack of any telecommunication infrastructure in rural and remote areas. In this paper, we consider two possible solutions both based on a UAV equipped as an IoT communication gateway. We consider the Long Range Wireless Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol, belonging to the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) category, as the communication protocol of IoT devices. The considered scenario involves the use of the UAV to collect data generated by multiple IoT LoRaWAN sensors. The difference between the solutions is how these data reach the storage plat- form we assume is located on the Internet. In the first solution, the UAV is directly connected to a storage platform through a simulated satellite link; while in the second solution the UAV acts as a data mule, temporary storing the information onboard during all the data gathering phase downloading it to the storage platform only when it comes back to the landing spot. A performance analysis has been carried out comparing the two solutions in terms of delivery time, required storage space, and energy consumption

UAV and Satellite Employment for the Internet of Things Use Case

Since the previous decades, the Internet of Things (IoT) is capturing a major interest and making critical changes in our life. It has been established in different sectors all over the world such as health-care, agricultural, logistics, etc. Long range transmissions and low energy consumption are two main features that IoT communication protocols should accomplish from a communication viewpoint. This led to the definition and deployment of a plethora of commercial or standardized solutions within the Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) category. From an architectural viewpoint, solutions to extend current network coverage are needed to allow IoT employment in all possible use cases. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have witnessed exceptional growth and high demand in the IoT area. Besides, extending the number of supported devices and link capacity in urban areas and extending the coverage in rural and remote areas through satellite communication networks is envisioned as an improvement of the overall network infrastructure within the fifth generation of mobile communication (5G) framework. This paper presents a study of deploying an IoT communication protocol (LoRaWAN) gateway onboard a UAV communicating with the terrestrial network through a simulated satellite link. The aim of the study is to propose and test UAVs together with satellites as possible means to, on one hand, extend the coverage of LoRa network, and, on the other hand, offer a common solution to allow data exchange with multiple devices implementing different IoT communication protocols

UAV‐based LoRaWAN flying gateway for the internet of flying things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the paradigms related to the evolution of telecommunication networks which is contributing to the evolution of numerous use cases, such as smart city and smart agriculture. However, the current communication infrastructure and wireless communication technologies are not always able to guarantee a proper service for these IoT scenarios. Smart solutions are needed to overcome current terrestrial network limitations offering a cost-effective way to extend the current terrestrial network coverage. For example, temporary extensions “on-request” of the terrestrial infrastructure may be a viable solution to allow collecting data generated by nodes outside the current network coverage. Flying objects can help achieve this goal. Various studies supported the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as intermediate nodes between IoT devices and the network. However, such solutions have not been exhaustively tested yet in real-case scenarios. This paper proposes an efficient solution to collect data from multiple IoT sensors in rural and remote areas based on UAVs. It describes the implementation of the proposed UAV-based Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) flying gateway able to collect data directly from LoRaWAN sensors during its flight, keep them stored in an onboard memory, and forward them at the end of its flying path to a platform where the authorized users can access them. A prototype of the gateway has been developed to assess the proposed solution through both indoor and outdoor tests aiming to test its feasibility both in terms of communication performance and UAV-required hardware resources

A Possible Smart Metering System Evolution for Rural and Remote Areas Employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Internet of Things in Smart Grids

The way of generating and distributing energy throughout the electrical grid to all users is evolving. The concept of Smart Grid (SG) took place to enhance the management of the electrical grid infrastructure and its functionalities from the traditional system to an improved one. To measure the energy consumption of the users is one of these functionalities that, in some countries, has already evolved from a periodical manual consumption reading to a more frequent and automatic one, leading to the concept of Smart Metering (SM). Technology improvement could be applied to the SM systems to allow, on one hand, a more efficient way to collect the energy consumption data of each user, and, on the other hand, a better distribution of the available energy through the infrastructure. Widespread communication solutions based on existing telecommunication infrastructures instead of using ad-hoc ones can be exploited for this purpose. In this paper, we recall the basic elements and the evolution of the SM network architecture focusing on how it could further improve in the near future. We report the main technologies and protocols which can be exploited for the data exchange throughout the infrastructure and the pros and cons of each solution. Finally, we propose an innovative solution as a possible evolution of the SM system. This solution is based on a set of Internet of Things (IoT) communication technologies called Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) which could be employed to improve the performance of the currently used technologies and provide additional functionalities. We also propose the employment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to periodically collect energy consumption data, with evident advantages especially if employed in rural and remote areas. We show some preliminary performance results which allow assessing the feasibility of the proposed approach

QoS-Aware Handover Strategies for Q/V Feeder Links in VHTS Systems

Offering very large data rates is one of the main objectives of Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) systems to boost enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services in converged 5G-satellite systems. To this end, the exploitation of Q/V frequency bands for the satellite feeder link is a key factor for guaranteeing unprecedented data rates provided that efficient handover algorithms are implemented to counteract link outage events caused by severe weather impairments. Moreover, Quality of Service (QoS) of data flows is typically affected when gateway handover is initiated, hence calling for sophisticated ground segment management solutions. In this light, this paper proposes a novel gateway handover strategy and validates its design through simulation campaigns, whose preliminary results show important performance gains with respect to other solutions available from the existing literature