Secure Transmission of Immutable Data for Low-Power, Long-Range Wireless IoT Services

Abstract

In this work, we propose a network hierarchy to enable low-power IoT services applying the directed-acyclic graph (DAG) based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) IOT $\Lambda$ Streams on top of the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) protocol LoRaWAN. For LPWAN technologies, the challenges for applying distributed ledger application layer protocols are the small payload sizes and duty cycle regulations with open frequency spectrum protocols and the transport protocol limitations in massive-machine-type mobile communication protocol derivations (e.g. NB-IoT). For low-power embedded end devices, additional challenges may arise in terms of local computation limitations, which can be a limiting factor in performing necessary DL protocol-related functions at the device level (e.g. hashing, encryption) to maximize DL-related technology benefits end-to-end. In this paper, we show the concept of a scalable, feeless, low-power communication solution for reliable and secure data transmission and processing in sensor networks employing the DL technology IOT $\Lambda$ based Streams protocol together with the LPWAN protocol LoRaWAN and demonstrate our design for the use case of a smart metering application.