Integration of LoRa-Cellular: Design and Implementation of Data Communication in Vehicle Tracking Systems

Abstract

The development of communication technology has improved efficient communication in tracking mobile objects. Several types of communication links are available for the tracking systems. Among them, cellular is the most widely used communication network for tracking inter-city areas. However, the implementation of IoT using cellular network requires the availability of communication network from network service providers. The communication will be lost for the area which is not covered by the cellular network. To overcome this problem, in this paper we proposed the Integration of LoRa-Cellular (ILC) using hybrid communications: LoRa network and the cellular network to trace a vehicle position. The decision which network used for communication is decided based on the level of RSSI. The energy consumption is also a parameter in the communication link selection. The transition process uses soft-handover to maintain the availability of communication links and reduce data loss. Our experiments show that the threshold of LoRa RSSI level uses -120 dBm and the threshold of cellular RSSI level uses -85 dBm. Energy consumption of Lora and cellular while sending data has a significant difference. Lora consumption is 292 mW and cellular consumption is 497 mW.