15 - LoRaWAN for smart cities: experimental study in a campus deployment

Abstract

The advent of cheap low-powered long-range radio technologies such as LoRa that operate on an unlicensed band resulted in many real-world deployments of smart city applications. Unlike a rural and semiurban areas where we can expect long radio-frequency (RF) propagation due to strong line-of-sight component, a city that typically comprises diverse terrain environments comprising a mix of buildings, dense wooded areas, parks, and gated communities limits the radio coverage and range. This necessitates the need for proper RF network planning to ensure optimal coverage of the network in such areas with the ability to remotely manage the infrastructure equipment to make deployment and network management hassle-free. On a city scale, there is a need for an interoperable middleware that provides a single point of contact for a developer to operate devices on various network protocols such as LoRa and Zigbee. In this chapter, we describe our experiences in deploying such an interoperable long-range wide-area network and management aspects of it in a campus environment with dense foliage interspersed with buildings and shed light on some deployment insights we have obtained in order to make an optimal network deployment.