Cloud native design of IoT baseband functions : Introduction to cloud native principles

Sammanfattning: The exponential growth of research and deployment of 5G networks has led to an increased interest in massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC), as we are on the quest to connect all devices. This can be attributed to the constant development of long-distance and low-powered Internet-of- Things (IoT) technologies, or, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies such as Long-Range (LoRa) and Narrow Band- IoT (NB-IoT). These technologies are gaining prominence in the IoT domain as the number of LPWAN connected devices has doubled from 2018 to 2019. This increase in devices warrants a proportional number of gateways to push the data to the Internet for further analytics. The traditional LPWAN architectures do not provide dynamic scaling of resources or energy-efficient solutions. Thus, a Cloud-Native (CN) split architecture based on the functional characteristics of the components is a necessity. In this work, a software-based implementation of the LoRa stack on GNU Radio is designed and implemented using Software-Defined Radio (SDR). The LoRa gateway is implemented in software completely, replicating the functions of the hardware for communicating with any LoRa Network Server. Several experiments with different setups have been performed on the testbed to measure the resource utilization and packet delay of the LoRa Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers. Also, the testbed has been moved into Docker containers to emulate a cloud-based platform and make the transition faster. Higher throughput and lower delay (Improvement in the range of 1.3x - 6.7x) were recorded upon splitting the testbed into Radio Head (RH) and Edge containers. Finally, three potential functional split architectures including the gateway have been discussed while providing a fair trade-off between pooling gain and consumed bandwidth for a CN split architecture.