PROJECT TITLE :

A Fault-Tolerant and Secure Architecture for Key Management in LoRaWAN Based on Permissioned Blockchain

ABSTRACT:

LoRaWAN is one of the primary technologies that is currently available to enable Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) environments. Low-Power Wide-Area Network, also known as LPWAN, is a new type of wireless technology that offers long range communication for devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT). The Join Server is an essential component of the LoRaWAN architecture. It is in charge of various security-related responsibilities, including authentication and the management of keys. On the other hand, given that all encryption keys are kept in a centralized location, the Join Server functions as a Single Point of Failure (SPOF). Then, the purpose of this paper is to present a safe and fault-tolerant architecture for LoRaWAN in order to raise the existing levels of security and availability. The Join Server is being replaced by a permissioned blockchain, and smart contracts are being used in order to solve the SPOF problem. In order to determine whether or not the proposed architecture is technically feasible, a functional prototype was developed by making use of open-source software. Additionally, the performance of a blockchain network was evaluated in a cloud environment while subjected to a variety of workloads, and fault-tolerance experiments were carried out in order to determine the extent to which network outages would be detrimental. When it comes to choosing the number of blockchain peers in small scenarios, the results indicate that one must make a choice between availability and performance. On the other hand, this behavior is inverted in large-scale scenarios, because the performance of multiple peers is optimal in those settings.