Dandelion: An Online Testbed for LoRa Development

LoRa has been shown as a promising technology for connecting millions for devices in the era of the Internet of Things. LoRa can provide long-distance (up to several kilometers) and low power communication with a modest data rate. However, developing LoRa protocols and testing LoRa systems face practical challenges compared with traditional networks such as Wi-Fi. For example, it requires network deployment in a wide area and even frequently updating the node program in the network for testing. To address those challenges, this paper presents Dandelion, an online testbed for LoRa development. Dandelion provides an easy-to-use interface for developing and testing LoRa applications. Dandelion consists of multiple LoRa nodes, gateways, central controller and web user interfaces. In Dandelion, LoRa nodes are deployed in different environments, each attached to a Raspberry Pi based edge node with out-ofband communication capability to collect system information. Dandelion also provides web based user interface to conveniently program each node, view the status of each node, update the program, etc. This significantly reduces the overhead for LoRa network development. We believe Dandelion can significantly reduce the costs of deployment, maintenance and evaluation of LoRa network. We show two examples of using Dandelion for LoRa network deployment. First, we measure packet reception rate of the LoRa packet with different parameters. Second, we do an RSSI-distance measurement to test and verify existing RSSIdistance LoRa model based on Dandelion.