Gateway

Gateways form the bridge between devices and The Things Network. Devices use low power networks like LoRaWAN to connect to the Gateway, while the Gateway uses high bandwidth networks like WiFi, Ethernet or Cellular to connect to The Things Network.

All gateways within reach of a device will receive the device’s messages and forward them to The Things Network. The network will deduplicate the messages and select the best gateway to forward any messages queued for downlink. A single gateway can serve thousands of devices.

Gateways are routers equipped with a Lora concentrator, allowing them to receive Lora packets. You can usually find two kinds of gateways:

• Gateways running on a minimal firmware, making them low-cost and easy to use (e.g. The Things Gateway), running only the packet forwarding software.
• Gateways running an operating system, for which the packet forwarding software is run as a background program (e.g. Kerlink IoT Station, Multitech Conduit). This gives more liberty to the gateway administrator to manage their gateway and to install their own software.

Any network has a boundary or a limit, so all communication placed within that network is conducted using the devices attached to it, including switches and routers. If a network node wants to communicate with a node/network that resides outsides of that network or an autonomous system, the network will require the services of a gateway, which is familiar with the routing path of other remote networks.

The gateway (or default gateway) is implemented at the boundary of a network to manage all the data communication that is routed internally or externally from that network. Besides routing packets, gateways also possess information about the host network's internal paths and the learned path of different remote networks. If a network node wants to communicate with a foreign network, it will pass the data packet to the gateway, which then routes it to the destination using the best possible path.