Evolving IoT networks by the confluence of MEC and LP-WAN paradigms

Novel technologies are emerging as promising enablers for future IoT networks. From the architecture organization perspective, a new trend of pushing both processing and storage capabilities closer to the end-devices is gaining momentum. Following this strategy, the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm proposes to place intelligence at the Radio Access Network (RAN) edge, i.e., in between the RAN and the cloud. This approach permits reducing operational latencies, as well as the possibility of accessing useful information from the RAN in real-time. Another technology that is receiving great attention during the last times is Low Power - Wide Area Network (LP-WAN). Solutions based on this paradigm promise long coverage range of about 10 km and improved power efficiency that permits end-device's lifetimes of about 10 years. Thus, in this work, both paradigms are deeply explored and its potential convergence is discussed. Furthermore, the results of experimental use-cases are presented. Concretely, a MEC node is integrated within an LP-WAN system with the aim of hosting several services: real-time physical layer management, IPv6 integration, storage offloading and data caching, and quick access to context-aware information from the end-nodes. The attained results show the validity of the proposed architecture, which gathers both novel paradigms: MEC technologies and LP-WAN networks.