With the rapid development of cloud and edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been deployed in various aspects of human life. In this paper, we design and implement a holistic LoRa-based IoT system with LoRa communication capabilities, named SPARC-LoRa, which consists of field sensor nodes and a gateway connected to the Internet. SPARC-LoRa has the following important features. First, the proposed wireless network of SPARC-LoRa is even-driven and using off-the-shelf microcontroller and LoRa communication modules with a customized PCB design to integrate all the hardware. This enables SPARC-LoRa to achieve low power consumption, long range communication, and low cost. With a new connection-based upper layer protocol design, the scalability and communication reliability of SPARC-loRa can be achieved. Second, an open source software including sensor nodes and servers is designed based on Docker container with cloud storage, computing, and LTE functionalities. In order to achieve reliable wireless communication under extreme conditions, a relay module is designed and applied to SPARC-LoRa to forward the data from sensor nodes to the gateway node. The system design and implementation is completely open source and hosted on the DigitalOcean Droplet Cloud. Hence, the proposed system enables further research and applications in both academia and industry. The proposed system has been tested in real fields under different and extreme environmental conditions in Salt Lake City, Utah and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The experimental results validate the features of SPARC-LoRa including low power, reliability, and cloud services provided by SPARC-LoRa.

翻译：随着云计算与边缘计算的快速发展，物联网（IoT）应用已渗透至人类生活的各个领域。本文设计并实现了一套具备LoRa通信能力的全栈式物联网系统——SPARC-LoRa，该系统由田间传感器节点与接入互联网的网关节点组成。SPARC-LoRa具备以下关键特性：首先，其无线网络采用事件驱动架构，基于商用微控制器与LoRa通信模块，通过定制PCB设计实现硬件集成，从而达成低功耗、远距离通信与低成本目标。通过创新的基于连接的顶层协议设计，系统实现了可扩展性与通信可靠性。其次，基于Docker容器技术，本文设计了包含传感器节点与服务器的开源软件架构，集成云存储、云计算及LTE通信功能。为保障极端环境下的可靠无线通信，系统还设计了中继模块，用于将传感器节点数据转发至网关节点。整个系统的设计与实现完全开源，并托管在DigitalOcean Droplet云平台上，可促进学术界与工业界的后续研究与应用。该系统已在美国犹他州盐湖城及内布拉斯加大学林肯分校的不同极端环境条件下完成实地测试，实验结果验证了SPARC-LoRa的低功耗、可靠性及云服务支持等特性。