Holistic framework for LPWAN protocol development

A critical problem for field installations of IoT devices is the connectivity of the individual nodes to the Internet. Specifically, with established LPWAN systems like LoRaWAN, accessing yet uncovered areas is only possible by setting up new gateways. Due to this, reaching nodes that are in an environment where no gateways can be set up is an open research problem. A promising idea to solve the proposed problem is to use a node within the range of a gateway for forwarding messages to nodes outside of its range. Such approaches have seen extensive discussion in literature. However, solutions for low-power embedded systems with limited resources heavily depend on the application and usually lead to creating a new protocol or protocol variant. In this paper we present a framework to simplify this protocol development and efficiently develop new protocols to extend established LPWAN systems' reach. The framework consists of a simulator that allows testing the protocol's behaviour in various scenarios in software. The simulator is accompanied by a system for deploying the protocol onto multiple hardware nodes in a test installation. This test installation setup also allows the collection of log messages from each node in real time. In this holistic approach, both, the simulation and the field test installation run the same protocol implementation.