Interworking between LoRaWAN and non-LoRa IoT Systems

LoRaWAN is a communication protocol and system architecture for connecting possibly very constrained devices through long-range wireless connectivity to application servers via LoRaWAN gateways. Currently there are several commercial and/or open-source platforms providing a complete LoRaWAN backend system that includes a LoRaWAN network server, join server and application server. Device data are exchanged between the end devices and the application servers and can be usually accessed by the user by proper application server interfaces (like REST API or MQTT). Unfortunately, these systems are heterogeneous in terms of external interfaces and do not provide inter-system communications. Moreover they provide a network solution for LoRaWAN-only devices, as no interoperability with non-LoRa devices is usually provided. Aiming to solve these issues, in this paper we introduce some interworking entities for letting a LoRaWAN system to communicate with other non-LoRa systems (either single devices or IoT networks). Then, leveraging this solutions, we propose an overall architecture capable of creating a larger heterogeneous data-centric IoT system. A complete implementation has been carried out and tested in order to prove the feasibility and simplicity of the proposed systems.