A Cost Efficient PSDR Network Using LPWAN

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is an IoT technology that is designed for long range and low bit rate machine-to-machine communication that is typically applied to sensor networks. In this paper the author demonstrates that off-the-shelf LPWAN-enabled IoT microcontroller hardware combined with mesh networking and edge caching software can be used to create a low-cost, rapidly deployable communication network that can be used in areas devoid of infrastructure. Experimental validation shows that our approach is valid over large areas and different terrains and thus demonstrates that LPWAN (and LoRa in particular) has the potential to be used in networking scenarios other than machine-to-machine sensor networks.