Class B, beacon messages

Gateways
1

Hi,
I’m studying the LoRaWAN specifications and I would have some clarifications regarding the Gateways and the Beacon messages.

  1. First of all, how much the gateways are dumb? Their job is just to forward packets (up and downlink)?

  2. In Class B mode, is the Network server that says to the gateways when they have to start to broadcast beacons? If yes, are the following beacons sent autonomously by the gateways?

Bonus question) What is the End-device low power duty-cycled beacon search?
From the specification:

The beacon Preamble shall begin with (a longer than default) 10 unmodulated symbols. This
allows end-devices to implement a low power duty-cycled beacon search.

Thanks for your help!
Ben

2 Likes
2

I have exaclty the same question, I don t find an answer to this question, I want to add the class B feature to my node, I checked the class B in TTN for this device, but there is no appearance in the console that a Beacon was sent, I don t know how to make TTN send beacons to the gateway (or make the gateway send beacons, the gateway I use is equipped with gps module)

3

TTN won’t send beacons because that is something the gateway handles. What software is your gateway running? For the ‘legacy packet forwarder’ beacons are enabled with a configuration setting in the local_conf,json or global_conf.json files. For BasicStation there is probably an option somewhere as well.

4

Thank you for your answer, that will orient my research in the good direction
I m using rakpios (os from rakwireless), and rak2287 (also from rakwireless) with raspberry 4, i m deploying the service BasicStation (the os uses docker) I will look for such files and I answer here if I found something to help people like me, otherwise if I can’t find theses files, I will look for another solution (always with raspberry 4 and rak2287 spi-with-gps based on sx1302)