Experimental Evaluation of LoRa in Transit Vehicle Tracking Service Based on Intelligent Transportation Systems and IoT

Felipe Jurado Murillo,Andrés David Varela López,Juan Sebastián Quintero Yoshioka,Álvaro Pachón De La Cruz,Ricardo Salazar-Cabrera,Juan Manuel Madrid Molina

doi:10.3390/electronics9111950

Felipe Jurado Murillo, Andrés David Varela López + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9111950

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Journal: Electronics	Publication Date: Nov 19, 2020
Citations: 9	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Icesi University, University of Cauca

Abstract

Long-range (LoRa) technology is a low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology that is currently being used for development of Internet of things (IoT)-based solutions. Transit transport, mainly in medium-sized cities where transit vehicles do not have exclusive lanes, is a service that can be improved with a tracking service using technology such as LoRa. Although some proposals exist, there is not enough experimental information to validate the LoRa technology as adequate. This article: (a) evaluates the operation of LoRa technology in a transit vehicle tracking service in a medium-sized city, based on an Intelligent Transportation Systems architecture and IoT; and (b) investigates optimal LoRa technology configuration parameters for the service. Experiments were performed in a semi-controlled environment using LoRa devices and a gateway, by measuring the received packets and the receive signal strength indicator (RSSI) and modifying: (a) distance; (b) number of devices; and (c) the main LoRa transmission parameters. Obtained results show the ideal values of parameters vary considerably with distance and number of devices used. There were very few settings of the experiments in which the RSSI and packet levels were adequate while distance and number of devices were both changed.

Highlights

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies are being used recently for development of Internet of things (IoT)-based solutions due to good range, efficiency, low energy consumption and low operation costs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The work presented in this paper proposes a prototype of a transit vehicle tracking service, based on Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and using LoRa technology in the critical communication that occurs between vehicles and network devices located on the roads
Considering, it is not possible to compare experiments performed in the related works with experiments in this research, because they have different characteristics, the spreading factor (SF) = 9, BW = 125 kHz, coding rate (CR) = 4/5 setting was taken as a baseline, because it produced good results in some related works

Summary

Introduction

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies are being used recently for development of IoT-based solutions due to good range, efficiency, low energy consumption and low operation costs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Mainly in medium-sized cities, where transit vehicles do not have exclusive lanes, has drawbacks related to speeding and noncompliance with traffic regulations, vehicle routes, schedules and frequencies [11,12]. These issues can be minimized by controlling and tracking transit vehicles through an IoT-based solution, using technologies such as LPWAN to transmit information between the vehicles and the information centers. Among the LPWAN technologies, LoRa has been selected as suitable for mobility services (e.g., transit vehicle tracking service) due to its high range, low operation cost, use of unlicensed frequency spectrum, adequate data rate and low latency [3,4]. LoRa technology has a high enough data rate to handle the required message rate; the size of the packet, limited, is adequate for this type of service; and latency is low enough to have transmission delays of less than 1 s in the distances handled in a tracking service [3,4]

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Conclusion