at our institute we are currently planning to build up a LoRaWAN - infrastructure. For that we’re planning to mount a few gateways to cover the entire area around us. As we’re often working with very sensible data, we are more or less forced by law to forward the received packages to an own internally hosted (i.e. non-TTN) network server.
However, at the same time we’d like to participate in the community and open our gateway infrastructure also for the TTN community. Is it possible to configure a gateway (e.g. the Lorix One) such that it distinguishes a package’s individual key specifications and forwards it accordingly only to the respective specified network sever? Meaning that a gateway forwards an institute-internally configured node only the inhouse server, but is also capable of forwarding packages from anybody else outside e.g. to the TTN network server. Thanks for any help and experience to this issue!
The encrypted LoRaWAN radio packet can be received by anyone in the device’s neighbourhood, so I assume you’re only worried about the decrypted data? That might need your own Application Server, but does not necessarily imply you cannot connect your gateways to a public Network Server.
The problem with a gateway belonging to two networks is de-conflicting overlapping downlink requests, especially in the case where one or both networks might have an alternate gateway that would be a viable choice for sending the downlink even if it didn’t have the absolute best signal of all gateways reporting the uplink in.
(If both downlinks need to be sent on the same frequency and spreading factor, then for some region of common coverage the conflict might be unsolvable, but in many bandplans the downlinks have a decent statistically likelihood of being on non-conflicting frequencies (especially if the uplinks themselves did not interfere beyond the point of intelligibility), and the issue is that they simply monopolize the gateway’s single transmitter)
This is true, however the likelyness of this to occur is extremely low. in LoRaWAN >95% is uplink traffic.
One other thing is that 2 network servers cannot keep track of dutycycle restriction on the downlink of the same gateway. Therefore two networks shall not share the same gateway. On the other hand, the likelyness that you will violate duty cycle constraints with the current loading of the networks is very low.
My advice: for now, connect the gateway to two networks until things that solve this issue are availabale.
The devil, as usually, is hidden in the details