This paper introduces BcWAN, a roaming solution for an IoT LoRa-based network that allows IoT end-devices to deliver data to their home network going through foreign gateways.

Our architecture removes the central core network and replaces it with a blockchain that handles the network access control. Any gateway in the system can communicate directly with another gateway in a peer-to-peer manner while maintaining confidentiality, integrity and soundness. Our work solves the fair exchange problem introduced in such architecture where no third party is involved thanks to a combination of encryption and specific blockchain techniques like custom script operators. We implement a proof of concept of the BcWAN architecture to gather an insight of the performance of the solution. We outline that BcWAN itself does not add any significant overhead to a near real-time IoT application by presenting preliminary test results.