Resilient, crowd-sourced LPWAN infrastructure using blockchain

Abstract

Low power communication is a major milestone for the Internet of Things (IoT). Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies seek to provide a large coverage area and long battery life at the cost of a reduced bandwidth compared to traditional networks. Commercially-available LPWAN solutions typically involve the usage of a wireless infrastructure from a network provider; with the notable exception of crowd-sourced networks, which use gateways from other users for wireless communication to end-devices. In this paper, we analyse the feasability of a fully decentralized LPWAN infrastructure and build a working prototype based on the LoRaWAN protocol.