Aggregation of Contiguous Packets in an Actual LoRaWAN Passive Packet Sniffer

IoT technologies are becoming more pervasive in many critical applications which leads to an increase in the deployment of the popular LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) networks. Therefore, it is essential to characterize the network performance and monitor targeted end nodes. In this paper, a passive packet sniffer is proposed that can monitor LoRaWAN at a given geographical location. Using a commercial gateway, a measurement is conducted to passively collect LoRa (Long Range) packets within a duration of one month. From the acquired data, the transmission parameters of the received packets are analyzed. Furthermore, information is extracted from various fields of the frame structure. Then, a Sequence of Contiguous Packets (SCP) is introduced for providing additional packet labeling beyond the Device Address (DevAddr). This original SCP algorithm classifies a stream of packets transmitted by a single end node, based on the similarities between the packets’ parameters. The feasibility of the proposed SCP algorithm is confirmed after presenting statistical analysis and the characteristics of estimated SCPs from the real acquired data.