FLIP: Federation support for Long range low power Internet of things Protocols

There is growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) and especially Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), which are rapidly being rolled-out globally. Within the LPWAN market, LoRaWAN is considered a leading solution which has achieved significant success. Despite the rapid uptake of LoRaWAN, scalability concerns arising from interference and contention are also growing. While the current LoRaWAN protocol includes basic techniques to deal with these problems, recent research has shown that these mechanisms are ineffective at large scale. This paper addresses this problem by proposing FLIP, a novel, fully distributed and open architecture for LoRaWAN, that transforms standard LoRa gateways into a federated network, while preserving the privacy and security properties of the original LoRaWAN architecture. FLIP tackles the scalability limitations of LoRaWAN using consensus-driven and localised resource sharing between gateways, while also providing inherent support for the roaming of LoRa devices across the federation. Critically, the FLIP architecture is fully backwards compatible with all existing LoRa gateways and requires no modifications to the firmware of LoRa end-devices, facilitating its rapid adoption.