Hi guys
I would like to get your thoughts about our planned architecture for an upcoming project. A bit lengthy, but hopefully others can benefit from this discussion about creating Smart/Edge lorawan gateways
We chose the RAK7243 gateway for an agri-tech project we are deploying this year. We plan to deploy few dozen gateways in rural areas on solar power with LTE backhaul.
** edit**
Reason for this choice of GW: We require a low-power LoRaWAN GW with 4G/LTE, GPS, USB Host, and Linux to install special sensor drivers on. Affordable as well. This narrows the GW market dramatically 
Our gateway will only try to get cellular connectivity every 30 minutes for 5 minutes to upload accumulated data. Besides to receiving some sensor data via lorawan, it also has some other peripherals connected to it (sensors/cameras) directly which it will sample and upload to the cloud.
Our main constrains are:
- Minimize power consumption due to solar power
- Work offline due to unstable cellular connectivity
Things we do not care about:
Devices communicating.joining the same network via multiple gateways
Since we do not want to relay on cellular connectivity for the lorawan network to work so we decided to go with the full chirpstack install on each gateway (like the gateway-os-full image, but for now we are using the RAK version of it)
So the main things we need to figure out are:
- How to provision devices on the gateway remotely
option 1: remote join server
- I cannot find still good examples on how to setup such external join servers, anyone has code example?
- GW will still need cellular connectivity to accept new device join requests
option 2: a script on the GW that will check my own db for devices to add and will self-provision devices locally onto the app server using the api
Benefits:
- once a device is provisioned onto the gw, it can join without backhaul connectivity.
- How to store upLink messages between each backhaul dump
- Option 1: I am thinking the postgresql integration is the way to go here
- Option 2: Create some local service and point http integration to it, store incoming packets as .json files
- How to send remote downLink messages to each end-device
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Option 1: The gateway will subscribe to a topic and will receive intended messages to devices that are listed as provisioned to it. The GW will post the messages locally to the end-devices using MQTT topic or API
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Option 2: ideas?
- Remote software / configuration updates of gateway stack
Obviously by not using a central network server, we need the ability to make config changes to the various elements.
- option 1: if we manage to build our custom gateway-os image, or not, we will try to use mender.io for this, either as a full image FOTA or configuration change only.
Well guys, I know that lorawan wasn’t intended at first for such use-cases (low-power, limited backhaul with potential high-latency), or for the gateways to being smart, but I think the real-world, especially with agri-tech is taking this technology there. So I hope that the alliance will also make adaptations that will make this sort of processes more streamlined, for example,
I think I learned that Basic Station has a message buffer now? I know that some GW providers do utilize a message buffer for no-connection periods.
Discussion:
Am I overthinking this? Can I use a buffer on the Gateway, or maybe something local Gateway bridge to accomplish this? This will solve me the keep-data when there is no cellular connectivity but it will still not solve the join-request when offline, or downlink situation right?
Cheers 