An SDR-based Satellite Gateway for Internet of Remote Things (IoRT) Applications

Internet-of-Things (IoT) represents a breakthrough for the current ICT market. In many IoT applications, sensors and actuators are distributed over very wide areas, sometimes not reached by terrestrial networks. In such scenarios, the satellite plays a significant role. In this paper, a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) - based satellite gateway for Internet-of-Remote-Things (IoRT) is proposed. The use of SDR allows to decrease equipment cost and provides higher flexibility. The proposed architecture has been implemented by using a standalone SDR platform and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) modules for covering the main terrestrial IoT standards. Extensive proof-of-concept results are presented and discussed. Uplink and downlink tests showed the correct functionality implementation and transmitted signal generation, while the integration tests allowed to assess the reliability of the end-to-end information processing. Reconfigurability tests confirmed the capability of the gateway of dynamically updating in real-time its protocol settings. The overall test results showed the validity of the proposed SDR-based gateway for IoRT applications.