Mobile LoRa Gateway for Communication and Sensing on the Railway

This work presents a LoRa channel access strategy that allows a single-channel high-speed moving LoRa gate-way to discover and receive sensing data from end devices installed in the railroad. This medium access is based on control messages to coordinate the communication between the mobile gateway and static sensors. The proposed approach is tested in a real mobile environment and compared with the well established LoRaWAN protocol. The results show that our solution outperforms LoRaWAN both in packet error rate and throughput, revealing the differences between a non-awareness solution such as LoRaWAN, and a solution where the end node only transmits when receiving a control message alerting that a LoRa gateway is nearby.