A Testbed for Long-Range LoRa Communication

Designing and testing low-power wireless communication protocols often requires experimental deployments on real hardware in realistic settings. Infrastructure testbeds have the advantage that they allow reproducible results using different network configurations. However, most testbeds are either in-or outdoor only and do not span long and short ranges at the same time. In this work, we present an extension to the popular FlockLab testbed on a campus-scale in order to better support testing of long-range communciation, for example using the LoRa modulation. Different to existing LoRa test networks where specific protocol layers are fixed, we support custom modification above the physical hardware (above PHY) which allows the development and testing of alternative full custom MAC layers that are not based on LoRaWAN.