This paper deals with a cloud radio access network (CRAN)
architecture for the LoRa system. In the suggested design,
the gateway embeds a limited remote radio head (RRH),
including the analog radio-frequency (RF) analog part, the
digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion, and a
digital front-end (DFE). The other LoRa network functions,
including the physical (PHY) layer, the LoRaWAN medium
access control (MAC) layer, and the application and customer
servers are implemented as cloud resources. The
presented approach leads to a flexible RAN that is robust
to the variations of capacity needs. Furthermore, it allows
us to test very specific LoRa features, such as the detection
or demodulation, while bypassing the other ones including
the hardware RRH. The methodology and tools we
used to deploy a LoRa cloud RAN are detailed, and results
concerning the performance indicator (CPU load, memory
consumption) are provided as well.