Integrated Satellite-terrestrial networks for IoT: LoRaWAN as a Flying Gateway
Creators: name: MOHEDDINE, AYA
Publisher: name: Universit� degli studi di Genova
Year: 2022

description: When the Internet of Things (IoT) was introduced, it causes an immense change in 
human life. Recently, different IoT emerging use cases, which will involve an even higher
number of connected devices aimed at collecting and sending data with different purposes
and over different application scenarios, such as smart city, smart factory, and smart
agriculture. In some cases, the terrestrial infrastructure is not enough to guarantee the
typical performance indicators due to its design and intrinsic limitations. Coverage is
an example, where the terrestrial infrastructure is not able to cover certain areas such
as remote and rural areas. Flying technologies, such as communication satellites and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), can contribute to overcome the limitations of the
terrestrial infrastructure, offering wider coverage, higher resilience and availability, and
improving user?s Quality of Experience (QoE). IoT can benefit from the UAVs and satellite
integration in many ways, also beyond the coverage extension and the increase of the
available bandwidth that these objects can offer. This thesis proposes the integration
of both IoT and UAVs to guarantee the increased coverage in hard to reach and out of
coverage areas. Its core focus addresses the development of the IoT flying gateway and
data mule and testing both approaches to show their feasibility.
The first approach for the integration of IoT and UAV results in the implementing of
LoRa flying gateway with the aim of increasing the IoT communication protocols?
coverage area to reach remote and rural areas. This flying gateway examines the
feasibility for extending the coverage in a remote area and transmitting the data to the IoT cloud in real-time. Moreover, it considers the presence of a satellite between the
gateway and the final destination for areas with no Internet connectivity and
communication means such as WiFi, Ethernet, 4G, or LTE. The experimental results
have shown that deploying a LoRa gateway on board a flying drone is an ideal option
for the extension of the IoT network coverage in rural and remote areas.
The second approach for the integration of the aforementioned technologies is the
deployment of IoT data mule concept for LoRa networks. The difference here is the
storage of the data on board of the gateway and not transmitting the data to the IoT
cloud in real time. The aim of this approach is to receive the data from the LoRa
sensors installed in a remote area, store them in the gateway up until this flying
gateway is connected to the Internet. The experimental results have shown the
feasibility of our flying data mule in terms of signal quality, data delivery, power
consumption and gateway status.
The third approach considers the security aspect in LoRa networks. The possible
physical attacks that can be performed on any LoRa device can be performed once its
location is revealed. Position estimation was carried out using one of the LoRa signal
features: RSSI. The values of RSSI are fed to the Trilateration localization algorithm to
estimate the device?s position. Different outdoor tests were done with and without the
drone, and the results have shown that RSSI is a low cost option for position estimation
that can result in a slight error due to different environmental conditions that affect
the signal quality.
In conclusion, by adopting both IoT technology and UAV, this thesis advances the
development of flying LoRa gateway and LoRa data mule for the aim of increasing the
coverage of LoRa networks to reach rural and remote areas. Moreover, this research
could be considered as the first step towards the development of high quality and
performance LoRa flying gateway to be tested and used in massive LoRa IoT networks
in rural and remote areas.