title: LoRa based network stack alternatives to LoRaWAN
body: <p>As far as I understand, LoRaWAN is intentionally designed as a Non-IP Stack.
  Based on all requirements on LoRaWAN, I can understand the design decisions behind the standard.</p>
  <p>But IMHO, there are many other use cases for LoRa (just the physical protocol) which, for example, do</p>
  <ul>
  <li>not need to be able to communicate to many gateways at the same time or</li>
  <li>don't have low energy consumption requirements.</li>
  </ul>
  <p>For these use cases, it would be nice to have other MAC implementations, where one could either have</p>
  <ul>
  <li>IP-based stack on top of LoRa or</li>
  <li>a lightweight protocol between LoRa-based Sensor and ONE gateway, which handles message transport &amp; security</li>
  </ul>
  <p>Sigfox has a similar architecture to LoRaWAN where the device/sensor sends messages directly to a backend-network to which the application needs to connect.
  To me, this kind of architecture seems pretty odd, since I loose many advantages of the internet and I am tightly coupled to a backend-network provider (imagine using LTE, you would need to explicitly add your application to the mobile providers backend).</p>
  <p>I would like to have a local network (would be okay if it is not IP based) but the devices are connected to a gateway and there I have all flexibility what to do with the sensor data. Using LoRaWAN, this could be achieved by running a network server on the gateway but this would be rather a workaround than a solution I am looking for.</p>
  <p>The only reason that I can see now, which makes this network architecture really necessary are that a device can connect to multiple gateways and therefore use cases as, e.g., asset tracking can easily be realized.</p>
  <p>Are there any LoRa based solutions where I do not have to deal with setting up network servers? If not, why is that the case?</p>
  <p>Edit:
  For Linux, I found this project here:
  <a href="https://de.slideshare.net/chienhungpan/lets-have-an-ieee-802154-over-lora-linux-device-driver-for-iot" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://de.slideshare.net/chienhungpan/lets-have-an-ieee-802154-over-lora-linux-device-driver-for-iot</a>
  And also the LoRa Mesh Project:
  <a href="https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device</a></p>