Design and development for 5G-LoRa gateways

Abstract

As reported in 2017, industry 4.0 improved the productivity gains and quality gains of factories. However, the development of industry 4.0 requires high bandwidth for simultaneous processing of a considerable number of devices, a high data rate for processing big data, and low latency for real-time controlling. Coincidentally, these are the features of 5G. Therefore, 5G is becoming a leading trend that is going to complement 4G. Although 5G provides lots of opportunities, its critical limitation is the short transmitting range. There are insufficient solutions to solve this limitation. In this project, the 5G-LoRa system is developed to resolve the short transmitting range of 5G as LoRa allows long-range transmission. 5G-LoRa system includes LoRa node, 5G-LoRa gateway, and Network server. LoRa node can be used for detecting temperature, pressure, and humidity or even capturing images. 5G-LoRa gateway receives data from LoRa node through LoRaWAN and uploads data to the network server through 5G so that we can see data in the server. This project combines LoRa and 5G to solve the transmission limitation of 5G. And I properly built the first 5G-LoRa Gateway in the world in this project. This project is also the first published project that applies 5G network in the real world in the City University of Hong Kong and the City University of Hong Kong is the first University in Hong Kong that installed 5G Gateway on the campus which is sponsored by SmarTone.