Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are technologies covering
different applications based on long range, low bandwidth and low
power operation The use of IETF protocols in the LPWAN technologies
should contribute to the deployment of a wide number of applications
in an open and standard environment where actual devices using LPWAN
technologies will be able to communicate This document makes a survey
of the principal characteristics of these technologies and provides
the gaps for the integration on the IETF protocol stack

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) landscape is expanding with new radio technologies. In addition to the Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN), the recent set of technologies conforming the so-called Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WAN) offers long-range communications, allowing one to send small pieces of information at a reduced energy cost, which promotes the creation of new IoT applications and services. However, LP-WAN technologies pose new challenges since they have strong limitations in the available bandwidth. In general, a first step prior to a smart object being able to gain access to the network is the process of network access authentication. It involves authentication, authorization and key management operations. This process is of vital importance for operators to control network resources. However, proposals for managing network access authentication in LP-WAN are tailored to the specifics of each technology, which could introduce interoperability problems in the future. In this sense, little effort has been put so far into providing a wireless-independent solution for network access authentication in the area of LP-WAN. To fill this gap, we propose a service named Low-Overhead CoAP-EAP (LO-CoAP-EAP), which is based on previous work designed for LR-WPAN. LO-CoAP-EAP integrates the use of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructures and the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) protocol. For this integration, we use the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to design a network authentication service independent of the type of LP-WAN technology. LO-CoAP-EAP represents a trade-off between flexibility, wireless technology independence, scalability and performance in LP-WAN.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/11/2646/pdf

LPWAN Survey and GAP Analysis

A CoAP-Based Network Access Authentication Service for Low-Power Wide Area Networks: LO-CoAP-EAP

Security and interoperability are critical factors in Internet of Things (IoT) constrained networks in order to boost their fully integration with the Internet In particular, secure bootstrapping and long headers compression, eg, IPv6, are key procedures to enable end-to-end security associations with robust algorithms among cloud platforms and IoT devices Nevertheless, few efforts are being dedicated to provide secure end-to-end authentication in IoT networks based on the prominent Low Power-Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) paradigm such as LoRaWAN Thereby, this work discusses the security and interoperability requirements of these systems by means of a realistic use case, namely, smart-agriculture In order to cope with the identified gaps, we present a novel solution based on the combination of the LP-WAN Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) scheme for IPv6/UDP/CoAP messages and Low-Overhead CoAP-EAP (LO-CoAP-EAP) bootstrapping This enables the establishment of security association through IoT constrained links Both protocols, which are two Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposals, are integrated and adapted to be compliant with the LoRaWAN architecture and its stringent communication restrictions The results show the validity of our approach with different LoRaWAN configurations, which notably increases the robustness of the overall IoT infrastructure

LPWAN Survey and GAP Analysis

Citations

A CoAP-Based Network Access Authentication Service for Low-Power Wide Area Networks: LO-CoAP-EAP

Secure bootstrapping and header compression for IoT constrained networks

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Long-Range Wireless Radio Technologies: A Survey