Experiments of A LPWAN Tracking(TR) Platform
Based on Sigfox Test Network
Yeonjoon Chung, Jae Young Ahn, and Jae Du Huh
Hyper-connected Basic Technology Research Division, Hyper-connected Communication Research Laboratory,
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
Deajeon, Korea
Email: {ychung, ahnjy, jdhuh}@etri.re.kr
Abstract— In this paper, we propose an efficient LPWAN
tracking platform based on the sigfox network, which can be
applied to the short-range sensor object tracking system
variously such as elderly tracking, pet tracking, or private asset
tracking. As a result, we verified the functions of the designed
tracking platform linked with the sensor data are operated in
accordance with the sigfox network protocol established through
the sigfox network emulator. And it is also confirmed that the
various callback functions provided by sigfox are applied to a
real application server and the callback messages of sensor data
to users was tested and verified.
Keywords— LPWAN, Platform, Sigfox, Tracking, Sensor,
Callbacks, Protocol, Emulator
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, a low power wide-area network(LPWAN)
techniques have become a promising industrial research field
from variety of applications such as infrastructure networks,
metering, remote monitoring, and etc[1][2][8].
There are a number of applications that need this form of low
power wide-area wireless communications technology. A
LPWAN enables long range data transportation and has the
capacity to communicate with underground equipment, using
minimal power consumption. Furthermore, the low throughput
transmission combined with advanced signal processing
provides effective protection against interference. As a
consequence, the LPWAN is particularly well adapted for low
power machine to machine traffic where latency may be low.
The LPWAN can be applied to autonomous battery operated
M2M devices that sends only a few bytes per day, week or
month. The LPWAN technology can cooperate with cellular
networks addressing use cases where redundancy,
complementary or alternative connectivity is suitable.
Because of these LPWAN advantages, the LPWAN is applied
in many ways, for example, elderly or pet tracking, metering,
asset tracking, livestock tracking, and so on.
In this paper, we propose an efficient LPWAN tracking
platform based on the sigfox network, which is created for a
LPWAN system designed to support IoT deployments over
long ranges e.g. in excess of 20 km between a client device
and a base station. The proposed tracking platform can be
applied to the short-range sensor object tracking system
variously such as elderly tracking, pet tracking, or private
asset tracking.
978-1-5386-5041-7/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 1373
We organize this paper as follows: section II provides
backgrounds on the sigfox network. In the section III, We
describes the tracking platform design and implementation on
the sigfox test network. Section IV is about the experiment
setup and results. In the last section we explain the conclusion.
II. THE SIGFOX NETWORK
The sigfox network and technology is aimed at the low cost
machine to machine application areas where wide area
coverage is required. The sigfox uses a UNB (ultra-narrow
band) based radio technology to connect devices to its global
network. The use of UNB is key to providing a scalable, high-
capacity network, with very low energy consumption, while
maintaining a simple and easy to rollout star-based cell
infrastructure. The network operates in the globally available
ISM bands (license-free frequency bands) and co-exists in
these frequencies with other radio technologies, but without
any risk of collisions or capacity problems. The sigfox uses
license-exempt spectrum for their product, namely the 915
MHz band in the U.S. and 868 MHz band in Europe. The
sigfox created a UNB IoT communication system designed to
support IoT deployments over long ranges e.g. in excess of 20
km between a client device and a base station. The ultra-
narrow band operation is achieved using channel bandwidths
lower than 1 kHz that transport data payloads of 12 bytes
uplink and 8 bytes downlink with a protocol overhead of 26
bytes. The sigfox system is a cloud based network system
where data are passed to the backend server and customer
portal directly; users must then implement callbacks to route
the received data to their own systems.
At sigfox network system, various sensor node devices, for
example, metering sensors, tracking sensors, etc., can be
networked through sigfox radio network. Fig 1. represents the
sigfox network devices and overall network architecture
allocation and execution process in the cloud scheme.
The sigfox cloud system can automatically forward some
events using the callback system. Actually, the sigfox backend
system assumes cloud based the callback system. The sigfox
back-end provides a web application interface for device
management and configuration of data integration, as well as
standards based web APIs to automate the device management
and implement the data integration.
ICTC 2018

Figure 1 Sigfox network system
III. TRACKING PLATFORM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION ON
SIGFOX TEST NETWORK
In this section, we propose the LPWA tracking platform
system based on the sigfox network. The proposed system is
comprised of the sensor nodes, LPWA tracking system, sigfox
network emulator, and application server. The overall LPWA
tracking platform with sigfox test network architecture is
depicted in Fig. 2. Basically, the sensing data are collected and
transmitted to a LPWA tracking platform, which then pushes
the received data to the sigfox network built for each
application. In our design, we use the arduino hardware
platform and wisol sigfox network module (EVBSFM10R3)
for the LPWA tracking system. The platform is used to connect
sigfox network and to provide real-time sensor data from
various tracking sensors to users. As presented in Fig. 2, the
sigfox network emulator serves as the sigfox gateway and
sigfox cloud server. And then, an application server
corresponds to a customer server.
Figure 2 LPWA TR platform with sigfox test network
The sigfox provides a web application interface as well as
standardized web APIs to automate the device management
and to implement the data integration. Callbacks are triggered
when a new device message is received or when a device
communication loss is detected. The APIs are based on HTTPS
REST requests, such as GET or POST.
Figure 3 LPWA TR platform with sigfox module
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As presented in Fig. 3, a LPWA tracking platform runs on a
main controller board. The LPWA tracking platform consists
of platform components, RF message component, RF module
management, sigfox message component, and service
management. The platform component performs the tracking
platform functionality and sigfox initialization operations. The
RF message component and module management perform to
check sensor device connection status and manage sensor
device status for the sensor data uploads. The sigfox message
component is responsible for uploading sensor data and
controller board messages to the sigfox network in accordance
with the sigfox uplink frame format. The service management
block manages the entire tracking platform operation flows and
records some operation log files.
Figure 4 LPWA TR platform control flow
A schematic of the tracking platform control flow is depicte
d in Fig. 4. There are three operation modes for the compon
ents in the platform to work. First, there exists the operation
initialization mode for a platform and a sigfox module. At th
e active mode, the tracking platform checks sensor device c
onnection status and reads received sensor data. The platfor
m reads sensing data from sensors, processes and packages t
hem, and uploads them to the sigfox network. And then the
platform receives the downlink data from callback message
and updates operation condition when needed. Finally, the tr
acking platform turns to a waiting mode that lets the platfor
m stop the active mode operations for a while.
IV. EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULT
Table 1 LPWA TR platform equipment features
Sigfox TR platform equipments Specification datasheets
Main controller board Arduino Uno
Sigfox module Wisol EVBSFM10R3
Main controller board OS Free RTOS(AVR/ARM)
Arduino-api,
Sigfox library Arduinosigfox
Sigfox uplink center frequency 923.2 MHz
Sigfox downlink center 922.2 MHz
 frequency
Sigfox transmit power 14 dBm
Sigfox uplink bit rate 100 b/s
Application server (protocol) Apache 2.0 (HTTP 1.1)
Application server database Bitnami mysql (7.1.16)
Callback data handler
HTML + PHP
Callback service ack. handler
Application server address 129.254.81.97
Sigfox network emulator address 129.254.81.25
Microsoft network
Server traffic monitor
monitor 3.4
We present a table listing the specifications of LPWA tracking
platform equipments based on a sigfox network in Table I
extracted from specification datasheets. The sigfox was
designed mainly for downlink only and an uplink option is
available by leveraging a downlink acknowledgement
message to end nodes. In experiments, the main controller
board that transmits sensor data messages used an arduino uno
board and a sigfox radio module for sigfox radio
communications used a wisol EVBSFM10R3 board. We have
installed free RTOS and sigfox libraries on a main controller
board. At an application server, we have installed Apache 2.0
and bitnami mysql on the system. In addition, we have set up
two types of callback message handlers, callback data handler
and callback service acknowledge handler, on the server.
Finally, we used microsoft network monitor for investigating
HTTP GET or POST protocols between a sigfox network
emulator and an application server.
Figure 5 Sigfox radio configuration
Figure 6 Sigfox callback configuration
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Figure 5 presents the radio configuration of the sigfox network
emulator. As presented in the figure, the center frequency of
uplink band is set at the 923.2 MHz and the downlink
frequency is set at 922.2 MHz. The devices use a narrow-band
channel to upload data at 100 bps using a BPSK modulation.
Fig. 6 shows sigfox callback system configuration set by the
emulator. The emulator can automatically forward some
events using the callback system. Callbacks are triggered
when a new device message is received or when a network
event occurs. As in Fig. 6, we have a set of available variables
for each type of callback. We set to provide data callbacks for
messages events, service acknowledge callbacks for
confirmation of downlink message reception by the device,
and service status callback of the device. We choose the
channel of the callback has to be sent through an URL. Each
message is directly forwarded in a single HTTP request by
using HTTP GET or POST methods. In the downlink data
frame, we choose the same 8 bytes data defined as represented
in Fig. 6.
The data frame will be sent to a declared device by the
downlink transmission. Besides, we set a service acknowledge
callback to an application server as described in Fig. 6.
Figure 7 LPWA TR platform experiments with sigfox network
emulator
The testbed for sigfox tracking platform experiments is shown
in Fig. 7. The application server(number 1) collects callback
messages from the sigfox network. The sigfox network
emulator installed at the notebook(number 2). The emulator is
composed an USB device called sigfox SDR dongle(number 3),
associated to a software package that emulate the sigfox
network. The LPWA tracking platform(number 9) runs on the
main controller board(number 4) which sends sensor data and
controller board message(number 6) to a sigfox dongle(number
3) through a wisol sigfox board(number 5), where the sigfox
radio signal is used for the transmission. Then a sigfox network
emulator(number 2) sends the messages back to the application
server(number 1) with HTTP protocols. The callback data
handler(number 7) and callback acknowledge handler(number
8) is installed on an application server, which are basically php
files. The LPWA track database table(number 10) is defined
with bitnami mysql and uplink message lists from the sensor
and main controller board stored at track database table is listed
as presented in Fig. 7(number 11).
 messages of sensor data to users was tested and verified.
Finally, the detailed performance investigation of the proposed
tracking platform is what we are going to improve in the near
future.

Figure 8 Sigfox callback status messages

Each status message received from a main controller board is
displayed on the message pages as presented in Fig. 8. For each
message, the information displayed, for example, the device
identifier, timestamp of reception, the sequence number, the
payload, the link quality, and the callback status. As we know
from Fig. 8, the callback status indicates upwards and
downwards arrows side by side for a bidirectional transaction.

Figure 10 Uploaded message list of track database table

ACKNOWLOGEMENT
This work was supported by Institute for Information &
communications Technology Promotion(IITP) grant funded by
the Korea government(MSIP) (No. 2018-0-01482,
Development of Network Access Standards for Hybrid LPWA)
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