A Seamless Integration Solution for LoRaWAN Into 5G System

The Internet of Things (IoT) has succeeded to be one of the important future communication technologies. The evolution of IoT has accelerated along with the emergence of 5G considered as a leading IoT service provider. In this context, the low power wide area network (LPWAN) has recently attracted attention as it provides an impeccable infrastructure for massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTCs). Long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) is one of the most adopted LPWAN technologies in the world. However, an efficient integration of LoRaWAN technology into the 5G system (5GS) is required. In this article, we review briefly related work trying to integrate LoRaWAN into the 5GS. Then, we present our solution for the integration and we detail the adopted network architecture. We propose new authentication methods based on the extensible authentication protocol (EAP) providing secure access, and an adaptation function to attain seamless and efficient integration. In addition, we evaluate our solution in terms of performance and security. Moreover, a comparison of our solution with related work confirms the efficiency of our solution.