A New Blockchain-Enabled LoRa Gateway for Data Integrity and Improved Resource Utilisation

The Long-Range (LoRa) system for the Internet of Things (IoT) has proved effective in infrastructure, energy consumption, resource reduction, and pollution control. However, in terms of security, LoRa faces several challenges. LoRa has a centralised architecture where all sensor data is transmitted to a fog (edge) server via LoRa gateways and processed at the fog server. This exposes sensitive sensor data to some major security threats, such as data tampering, injection of fake data and data loss. LoRa gateways in such architecture simply forward packets to the server. We present a blockchain-based open-source solution for LoRa Gateways that addresses the security vulnerabilities of this architecture and utilises the computing and storage resources of LoRa Gateways. The main challenges in implementing blockchain at LoRa gateways are limited processing, storage capabilities and battery power. The number of gateway nodes improves security and reduces the workload on the fog server. With the introduction of packet processing at the gateway, unnecessary packets are dropped at the gateway itself. Simulation results depict a reduced CPU usage at the fog server for up to 2 % when 16 end devices are being used. Further, our work reduces the overall packet handling time by up to 17% compared to existing works.