The Things Network: A Globally Scalable Internet of Things Data Network

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that has significantly gained attention in recent years. It is a part of the Internet that connects arbitrary objects with embedded electronics to applications or to other objects. The Things Network's mission is to build an open and decentralized platform that supports a wide variety of IoT technologies. It builds upon open protocols and standards that operate in unlicensed radio spectrum, allowing anyone to set up their own network, instead of relying on telecom operators to deploy IoT networks.

In this master's thesis we give an overview of the long range, low power IoT technology LoRaWAN™ and present the distributed architecture for The Things Network's backend systems that are responsible for routing data between IoT devices and applications. In order to allow the backend to become fully distributed and decentralized, it was split into a number of components that have a specific set of tasks in the process of routing IoT data and can be scaled independently of other components. These backend components can be compiled for different operating systems and architectures, providing high flexibility when choosing an infrastructure provider for deployment. Containerization allows the backend to run in isolated environments that are easy to deploy and scale.