Routing and Packet Scheduling in LORAWANs-EPC Integration Network

Recently, Mobile Network Operators are considering the integration of the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) in their Evolved Packet Core (EPC) to expand their business, and to improve the interoperability and multivendor integration in their networks. In such integration, a LoRa gateway can implement the virtual base station function of the E-UTRAN Node B (eNodeB) protocol stacks to forward LoRa packets through EPC to the application servers. Unfortunately, the current integration of LoRa and the mobile access according to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) architectures does not allow the co-existence of multiple LoRa gateways, because the routing and scheduling mechanisms among them are not defined. Therefore, the LoRa gateways cannot operate together, limiting the overall performance of the integration network. In this paper, we investigate the problem of integrating multiple LoRaWANs into the EPC, which allows several LoRa gateways and sensors in various regions of LoRa signal coverage areas to access multiple network servers and application servers optimally. We propose methods to select dedicated routes in the EPC resource, and formulate the problem of optimal routing and packet scheduling to forward LoRa packets over the routes. The simulation results show our proposed solution can reduce the overall delay of the average 200 ms.