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LoRaWAN Bristol

Conference Paper · July 2017

DOI: 10.1145/3105831.3105835

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 LoRaWAN Bristol
Steve Battle Benedict Gaster
Computer Science and Creative Technologies, UWE Computer Science and Creative Technologies, UWE
Bristol, UK Bristol, UK
[Link]@[Link] [Link]@[Link]
ABSTRACT with a high-speed networked backend, LoRaWAN provides a dis-
The Bristol LoRaWAN Network is a low power radio network for tinctive value-proposition, trading high speed for longer range,
the Internet of Things, based on LoRaWAN and utilising The Things creating a niche for wireless enabled Smart Things. A 2015 pilot
Network. LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) programme in the city of Amsterdam aimed to cover the entire city
specification intended for wireless battery operated Things in re- with just 10 wireless gateways. LoRaWAN Bristol aims to replicate
gional, national, or global networks. LoRaWAN targets key require- this experiment in the UK.
ments of internet of things such as secure bi-directional communi-
cation, mobility and localisation services. A 2015 pilot programme 2 SMART THINGS
in the city of Amsterdam aimed to cover the entire city with just The term Internet of Things can be traced back to 1985 when Peter T.
10 wireless gateways. LoRaWAN Bristol aims to replicate this ex- Lewis stated at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (15th
periment in the UK. Annual Legislative Weekend, Washington, D.C. 1985), that “The
Internet of Things, or IoT, is the integration of people, processes
CCS CONCEPTS and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable
• Networks → Network performance evaluation; Network ex- remote monitoring, status, manipulation and evaluation of trends
perimentation; of such devices.” Yet is is only more recently that the hardware
has become sufficiently low-cost for the person-in-the-street to be
KEYWORDS able to consider building a sensing device that could be considered
LoRaWAN, LoRa, LPWAN, IoT cheap enough to be effectively disposable.
Devices like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi have introduced
ACM Reference format: a new generation of learners to the possibilities of tangible com-
Steve Battle and Benedict Gaster. 2017. LoRaWAN Bristol. In Proceedings of puting, the art of combining hardware with software to build novel
IDEAS ’17, Bristol, United Kingdom, July 12-14, 2017, 4 pages.
creations. However, we are still challenged to find applications of
[Link]
this technology that inspire and motivate through relevance to
people’s lives. Both the Arduino and the Pi were developed to meet
educational needs. The Arduino is a small micro-controller that
1 INTRODUCTION
can be connected to a wide variety of sensors and actuators. The
Soon, a myriad of devices will be connected via peer-to-peer net- development of the Arduino by Massimo Banzi followed on from
working and/or the public Internet, with a multitude of sensor- work by Hernando Barrágan on Wiring [14] used to teach Physical
driven devices dramatically changing our lives and our environ- Computing at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, in 2004.
ment. These devices will be based on a wide variety of hardware The Raspberry Pi, which came out in 2012, was designed to support
ranging from tiny (e.g., micro-controllers) to huge (e.g., cloud servers) the teaching of computer science in schools to counteract the trend
with one thing in common: they will require a radio connection in PCs for the hardware becoming increasingly inaccessible. The In-
to a Gateway that is connected to the internet, in some form or ternet of Things is a potential game-changer, and with the provision
another [7]. of low-cost infrastructure we seek to engage a wider community
LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) speci- in environmental sensing and citizen science. While the IoT is a
fication intended for wireless battery operated devices in regional, significant platform for new products and services, we believe that
national, or global networks. LoRaWAN targets key requirements it is equally important that individuals and communities are able
of internet of things such as secure bi-directional communication, to engage with the technology, and able to make their own cre-
mobility and localisation services. Where initiatives such as ‘Bristol ations [2]. From this perspective, a free, neutral and accessible IoT
is Open’ aim to cover locales within the city with 802.11* WiFi infrastructure is a key enabler for its utilisation as an educational
platform.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or The Internet of Things defines an infrastructure for so-called
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation smart-things [10]. A smart Thing is a physical object augmented
on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM with one or more:- sensors, actuators, computation, and communi-
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
cations (wired or wireless). These may be embedded devices that
fee. Request permissions from permissions@[Link]. can be positioned anywhere in the environment. For example, in
IDEAS ’17, July 12-14, 2017, Bristol, United Kingdom collaboration with Bristol City Council we are investigating embed-
© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5220-8/17/07. . . $15.00
ding cheap air-quality sensors within the structure of illuminated
[Link] maps that are located at various points around the city. Urban noise
maps can be used to record noise pollution across a city. Elsewhere
in Bristol, Knowle West Media Centre and Bristol City Council
have teamed up to create plastic sensor-equipped frogs to help
residents collect data about damp levels in their properties. Their
approach, also known as “The Bristol Approach” ensures that com-
munity technology programmes are driven by issues relevant to
local needs and take place at community level, with local people
actively involved in the design, testing and evaluation [3].

3 LORAWAN
For the Internet of Things to be successful, beyond the “smart home”,
it needs a widely accessible and free public network infrastructure,
that enables low-power devices to communicate with each other
and over the internet. To address this for the City of Bristol, we
are building the infrastructure for a LoRaWAN network, equally
accessible to business, communities and individual makers.
There are many communications technologies available on which
to base an Internet of Things. Within an enclosed space it makes
sense to communicate via 802.11* WiFi, offering a range of up to
46m indoors or 92m outdoors and a maximum data rate of 1.3
Gbps. Bluetooth, and particularly Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE or
Bluetooth Smart) support much reduced power consumption at a Figure 1: A LoRaWAN gateway including a Raspberry Pi act-
comparable range but at a significantly reduced maximum data rate ing as the network server with WiFi backhaul. The gateway
of 2 Mbps. While Bluetooth LE or even WiFi might be used around concentrator may be seen beneath the Pi. This is a portable
the home or within a limited range, the battery limitations of the unit for teaching so is fitted with a relatively small antenna.
latter and the range limitations of the former mean it is unlikely that
these standards will form the backbone of an IoT network. LoRa
and SigFox are both long range and provide the ability to build LoRaWAN is a realisation of a Low-Power, Wide-Area Network
devices that are very low-power and long range. LoRa the physical (LPWAN). The LoRaWAN architecture defines the relationship be-
layer of LoRaWAN, supports very low power devices (aiming for tween devices (also called Nodes) and a Gateway, which relays
many months to years of battery life) offering a maximum date rate messages to and from these devices and a network server. This
of just 27 kbps in exchange for Long Range; a 2-5 km range in urban two-level architecture:- network server to gateway, and gateway to
areas and in excess of 10 km in suburban areas [1]. Neither has device, is often described as having a “star of stars” topology [5]. A
good indoor signal penetration, but are well suited to devices in the single gateway may communicate with many thousands of devices.
wild. A key feature of these standards is they are low-bandwidth, The simplest Class A devices are simple low-power sensor nodes
often each message is limited to 100 or so bytes, and for SigFox that follow the so-called Aloha protocol. ‘Aloha’ is not an acronym,
even less. Each standard has its drawbacks but SigFox requires but simply a way for asynchronous devices to announce themselves
more expensive chipsets in its Gateways, which is not the case by sending a ‘hello’ message (the data packet). If more than one
for LoRa. When selecting hardware it is important to choose the device transmits at the same time then the messages are lost and
correct frequency for your region. LoRa operates in the unlicensed each device backs-off for a semi-random duration before re-sending.
spectrum reserved for Industrial, scientific, and Medical radio (the These Class A devices may also check for incoming messages im-
ISM band). In Europe, this is between 867-869 MHz, while in the mediately after they have sent a message, but at no other time. By
US it is between 902-928 MHz. LoRa is robust against interference contrast, Class B devices regularly poll for incoming messages (ev-
because it uses chirp spread spectrum modulation, hopping to a ery 128 seconds) which may be suitable for a non-critical actuator.
different frequency for each transmission [17]. Finally, Class C devices listen continuously for incoming messages
Cellular networks require careful placement of gateways to min- which increases power consumption, but this may be necessary for
imise overlap in coverage, and require complex protocols to support applications that demand fast-acting actuation.
hand-off from one gateway to another where users are mobile. By The network server connects to a high-bandwidth back-haul
comparison, LoRa networks can be “messy” with minimal planning network which may be wired or wireless. In the field we would
required. LoRa doesn’t have to support anything like a phone-call look to use existing ethernet connections (and potentially Power
or guarantees about streamed data; messages are small and inter- over Ethernet) or the 3/4G network where this is not available.
mittent. There is no requirement for hand-off, a device transmits to Figure 1 shows a combined gateway and network server within a
any device within range and messages can be de-duplicated later. weather-proof (IP66) case. Full instructions for building a Raspberry
Overlap in coverage is not a big problem and in future may even Pi based gateway/server can be found on GitHub [4]. The parts for
support location triangulation for devices without onboard GPS, building a gateway and network server can be purchased for under
providing for the location of things. £400.
 The aim of the LoRaWAN Bristol project is to provide coverage of
the City of Bristol and its surrounds with the purpose of supporting
education and outreach; working with schools and communities to
identify what information is relevant to their needs. A 2015 pilot
programme in the city of Amsterdam aimed to cover the entire
city with just 10 LoRaWAN gateways. This project began life as a
Kickstarter project, created by Wienke Giezeman, demonstrating
that an open, global and crowd-sourced Internet of Things data
network was possible. With its hilly landscape running from the
Mendip Hills in the south to the Cotswolds in the northeast, Bristol
provides an interesting contrast to Amsterdam.
Bristol LoRaWAN [6] is a group of like-minded people, forming a
community co-operative, established in 2016 to develop and deploy
a public Internet of Things, low-power, long range network to busi-
nesses, the community and voluntary sector, and the general public.
We are proposing to install a selection of LoRaWAN Gateways that
can communicate with devices developed by anyone and connect
to the The Things Network Backend, providing a gateway to the
internet. With UWE campuses being distributed across the city, it
is possible to foresee a home for LoRaWAN gateways that could
cover a large area of Bristol. We currently have a gateway at UWE
Frenchay campus. In addition, we are able to deploy LoRaWAN
gateways at existing wireless infrastructure locations provided by Figure 2: A battery powered Arduino Uno based LoRaWAN
Bristol Wireless. We currently have three city gateways, at Wind- device connected to an analog temperature sensor using a
mill hill, Easton, and the Engine-shed. These provide coverage of Grove shield. The Dragino LoRa shield (with antenna) is
Bristol city centre. We are working on installing three more to pro- based on the SX1276 LoRa transceiver.
vide wider coverage and greater redundancy. Initial data suggest
that we are seeing ranges of around 1.5 to 2 km, but the next step
will be to conduct a city-wide coverage survey.
[12]. It takes a 10 bit analog reading once per minute. To optimise
communications this value is transmitted in its raw form as a 2 byte
4 THE THINGS NETWORK integer rather than converting it into a 4 byte float representing
There are many competing IoT platforms including Apple’s Home- the temperature in degrees Celsius, which would consume twice
Kit, Google’s Android Things, Amazon’s AWS IoT, or Samsung the bandwidth.
SmartThings. However, each manufacturer is effectively creating The Seeedstudio Grove system offers a wide range of low-cost,
its own walled garden with features and protocols that only work modular sensors and actuators. A standard 4-pin connector sup-
with branded devices and apps. According to Bruce Sterling[16], ports both analog and digital sensors, and for more complex I/O
“The first thing to understand about the ‘Internet of Things’ is that demands, some modules use I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit). The
it’s not about things on the internet. It’s a code term that powerful Grove shield allows sensors and actuators to be plugged into the
stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes... Digital com- Arduino without need of soldering or breadboarding. This is in-
merce and governance is moving, as fast and hard as it possibly can, valuable in workshops where we aim to avoid learners giving-up
into a full-spectrum dominance over whatever used to be analogue.” through frustration caused by basic but hard to debug wiring errors.
The Things Network [8] is an open source initiative for creating a We find that with careful guidance, learners are able to build work-
grass-roots driven Internet of Things. A Things Network gateway ing IoT devices with both sensors and actuators, and have even
must be available free of charge to all connecting devices whether been inspired to come up with their own creations.
they are not-for-profit or for commercial use. Access must be pro- The Things Network provides a basic message transport layer
vided in a net neutral manner, limited only by capacity, rather than with end-to-end encryption. The IoT is frequently in the news be-
routing different kinds of data preferentially [9]. cause of security vulnerabilities in IoT enabled consumer devices.
In LoRaWAN terminology, a device is a smart-thing that can take Complex stacks, particularly those required to support HTTP (Hy-
measurements or perform actions. To economise on bandwidth perText Transfer Protocol), require frequent patching. A competing
devices can broadcast or receive small messages up to 64 bytes IoT standard, ZigBee, provides Over The Air (OTA) firmware up-
in length (including a 13 byte header). Furthermore, each device dates which provides a vector for malicious infections [15]. We
has an airtime limit of around 400 bytes per hour, which can be argue for security through simplicity; basing the IoT on devices
managed with an Adaptive Data Rate (ADR). However, this is more with minimal computational power with a fixed set of capabilities.
than enough to send a handful of sensor readings at intervals of LoRaWAN also provides support for device sessions; Over The Air
minutes. The Arduino based device shown in Figure 2 uses the open- Activation (OTAA) provides a robust way for devices to join the
source IBM LMIC (LoraMAC-in-C) library available from GitHub network and automatically rejoin after a reset or power-outage.
 Platforms such as ThingSpeak provide a permanent home for
our collected data, and being web-based allow us to name the data-
set with a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). This is the point
where the Internet of Things touches the Web of Things (WoT)
[13]. The WoT enables us to name our devices by URI and capture
metadata about them, despite the fact that they are not directly
resolvable. The standard tools of the web, from HTTP and URIs to
metadata and ontology, counter the potential fragmentation of the
Internet of Things by providing a unifying framework for semantic
interoperability.

6 CONCLUSION
In this paper we have shared our early experiences of building
not only an IoT network infrastructure, but also a community of
Figure 3: Temperature measurements from the heatwave of stakeholders including both users and infrastructure providers.
the summer solstice 2017 are read with an Arduino based de- This is supported through academic courses at UWE, educational
vice and are relayed via LoRaWAN gateway to The Things outreach and informal meet-ups with LoRaWAN Bristol providing
Network’s transport and session layers. Data storage appli- the technological focus. In the coming months we aim to collect
cations and Presentation are here provided by ThingSpeak quantitative data about the coverage and usage of the LoRaWAN
where the collected data can be averaged and plotted. in Bristol and compare this with the experience in Amsterdam.

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