A Flexible and Scalable Localization System for Off-the-Shelf LoRa Devices

Location Based Service is the key for most of IoT applications, and LoRa-based localization has attracted increasing research interests. The resolution of timestamp provided by LoRa gateway is still the determining factor for LoRa-based localization. Accurate localization is supported well with highly customized LoRa devices, meanwhile the current off-the-shelf LoRa devices have only microsecond accuracy. However, it’s impracticable to use many hardware customized LoRa devices in real deployments, in which cost control must be taken into consideration. Therefore a flexible and scalable LoRa-Based localization system has been designed and implemented in this paper. It aims to easily and flexibly build the hardware platform by using off-the-shelf LoRa Devices. Its customized system server consists of LoRa-Network-Server, LoRa-Geo-Server and LoRa-App-Server. All the geolocation computation can be done in LoRa-Geo-Server, and results will be transported to LoRa-Network-Server. This makes the proposed system more scalable to develop specific LoRa-App-Server which will provide more Location Based Services. System test results in different Gateway deployments show that the system localization accuracy is basically within the accuracy range of “LoRaWAN Geolocation Whitepaper” presented by LoRa Alliance. It can provide a good experimental platform support for LoRa Localization technology research.