Gateway-Free LoRa Mesh on ESP32: Design, Self-Healing Mechanisms, and Empirical Performance

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Embedded Systems

Background:

• LoRaWAN's centralized topology and gateway dependency limit IoT applications.
• Resource-constrained devices require efficient, fault-tolerant communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and validate a gateway-free LoRa mesh network on commodity microcontrollers.
• To implement lightweight self-healing mechanisms for reliable IoT communication.

Main Methods:

• Developed a mesh network using ESP32 microcontrollers and LoRa modulation.
• Implemented neighbor-based routing, hop-by-hop acknowledgments (ACKs), and controlled retransmissions.
• Utilized listen-before-talk (LBT) and alternate link triggering (ALT) for reliability.

Main Results:

• Achieved up to 95% Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) in ideal conditions and 75% in urban deployments.
• Demonstrated self-healing capabilities with an 88.33% Packet Recovery Ratio (PRR) during node failure.
• Validated robust performance on ESP32-S3 + SX1262 hardware.

Conclusions:

• A compact, fault-tolerant LoRa mesh network without gateways is feasible on commodity hardware.
• The developed system overcomes LoRaWAN's operational constraints for IoT.
• Lightweight self-healing mechanisms enhance communication reliability in resource-constrained environments.