Implementation of Failure Recovery in Emergency IoT Applications Using D2D in LoRa/LoRaWAN

As the number of connected devices is increasing, several new communication technologies are getting developed and deployed to serve the rising need. Cellular Internet of Things (C-IoT) is the umbrella of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies introduced by 3GPP in order to support critical IoT applications. C- IoT technologies are deployed by Mobile Network Operators (MNO) of the country to support IoT devices. Unfortunately, just like other wireless communication technologies, C- IoT may also suffer coverage outages in some regions of the country (e.g., Forests, basements, etc.). Unlike other wireless technologies such as LTE, 5G, etc. C-IoT is typically only deployed in one frequency spectrum (band 20 in Denmark [17]), making the handover of these IoT devices in an outage scenario difficult. This significantly affects critical IoT applications like remote health monitors, location tracers, etc., where communicating data through the network is extremely important. This paper focuses on using Device-to-Device (D2D) communication using LoRa and LoRaWAN to create a low-cost, easy-to-deploy, and manage network infrastructure to minimize data loss because of outage scenarios. In order to validate this approach, authors have developed a number of prototype devices based on C-IoT and LoRa/LoRaWAN and performed experiments.